


Dana

by audreythree



Series: AU season three - Dana [1]
Category: Haven - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-30
Updated: 2012-05-04
Packaged: 2017-11-04 14:41:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 23,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/394997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/audreythree/pseuds/audreythree
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two years after Audrey Parker disappeared... Dana Bellamy rides into town.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Not Audrey

Fourteen dollars.

She counted it out and stuffed it back in the pocket of her jeans.  Dana had exactly fourteen dollars to her name.  That _bastard_ Corey had taken everything else – her makeup, her one change of jeans, even her frelling phone. All of it packed in the saddlebags of the BMW, leaving her with the 500cc Suzuki, twenty years old and a permanently choked carb.

And, no doubt, helmet hair.

Dana kicked the bike’s tire.  It wasn’t the bike’s fault.  It had over three hundred thousand miles on it, rebuilt four times – twice by her father, twice by Dana herself.  Of the two bikes she almost… no, screw that.  Sentimental value was one thing, and she more than appreciated her father’s single legacy to her, but GTL was six cylinders and 1600cc of sleek luxury.  Bit of a road hog, but by the end of the day she felt like she’d ridden six hours of foreplay. Whereas the Suzuki’s vibrating front suspension numbed her wrists and made her tailbone ache.

And, technically, it belonged to Corey – despite the way he’d let her ride it, more on than off, for as long as they rode together.  Almost fifteen years her senior, they made a bit of an odd couple – he a college professor on sabbatical and she… a student of the world.  She liked his bike; he kept her like some rare species of wildlife he needed to study.  An exotic pet.  Thus the explanation for why all her stuff was in his bike.   She wasn’t even that upset that he’d left her behind. They’d barely spoken between here and Moncton and the hours long delay at the border – _his_ two marijuana joints to blame – was just the last straw.

So, she was dumped, in Maine, with fourteen dollars to her name. 

The helmet hair was more of a problem.  A girl had to do what a girl had to do, and she couldn’t do that with hair that was stringy and flat.

Dana tucked the helmet onto the handles.  She wasn’t going to carry it into the bar.  The leather jacket was bad enough, especially in a tourist trap place like this one looked like, but attitude was the secret to carrying that off.

Actually, once inside, she revised her estimation of  the place up several notches.  Good atmosphere, not overdosed on the nautical kitsch despite the location and nautical name.  The oil in the fryer was fresh. She could smell old fat from forty paces after years in waitressing.  Good mix of  locals and tourists too.  If the locals came, the food had to be decent, and the prices reasonable.

Dana slipped down the way to the ladies, escaping a hostess headed her way – actually the hostess stopped in her tracks at the sight of her.  Maybe the helmet hair and the leather was too much after all.  It didn’t look like a fancy dress place, but snooty eateries popped up in all kinds of out of the way places.  Maybe even little Haven, Maine.

 

She did what she could with water and the hand dryer.  Combed out her hair with her fingers.  Dampened and scrunched, it fell in free flowing raven waves to her shoulder blades.  So, yes, sometimes it earned her keep.

She rubbed color into her cheeks. She’d skipped breakfast, and lunch had been a snack bar out of a vending machine at Customs, so perhaps she had an excuse for looking a bit wan. Brown eyes – she passed over them. She could have been married and rich if only she’d been born with blue eyes. She’d never liked the brown eyes, despite the compliments men tried with her on that feature. They didn’t feel right. Her eyes should have been blue.

 _If only_ wishes were horses.

Fourteen dollars, she reminded herself.  It had nothing to do with pride.

The hostess burst into the tiny restroom as if pushed from behind. She held an empty tray in both arms in front of her, like armor, her wide brown eyes staring.  “Hi.”  She lifted a tiny hand with a tiny wave, promptly hid it again behind the tray.  Five foot two, five three maybe, Dana observed.  Size zero.  Latina.  Scared like Dana held a knife to her throat.

“Hi?” Dana responded.  The fourteen dollars was starting to look even smaller now, if they were going to insist on her buying something for the privilege of using their bathroom.  That’s the only reason Dana could think of that the woman would be scared of her, pushed in here by some interfering manager when he couldn’t confront her himself.

Yes, she rode a bike.  Yes, she wore leather.  No, she did not have piercings or tattoos or a bad attitude.  Even the scary bald black boyfriend – that _bastard_ Corey – was probably in the next county by now.

“You wouldn’t happen to have any mousse or gel on you, by any chance?” Dana asked.  Eyeliner was too much to hope for.

The hostess stared some more.

Okay then.

Dana hit the hand dryer once more, flopped her hair upside down underneath for one more fluff cycle.

The hostess escaped out the door.

Dana wondered if that had even been some awkward kind of come on.  Then she heard voices on the other side of the door.  A man’s voice, demanding, and the squeaking voice of the hostess trying to justify herself.  So her first guess had been right.  Bloody man – sending a woman to do his job.

She wrenched open the door to confront him.  Fourteen dollars or no, she wouldn’t let the other woman lose her job.  She could pay for a drink.  It wasn’t some fucking spa, either.  It was just a restroom in a bar.

The look he gave her was gratifying, at first.  He forgot entirely about the hostess, who made good her escape with a brief look over her shoulder, her tray still tightly held to her chest.  Dana liked to make a good first impression, and this guy – he was so her type it was scary. Careless hair that fell into his eyes, and one of those faces that only grew more interesting the more you looked at it.  At him.  Lean as a greyhound and fingers long enough to inspire curiosity and puckish speculation.

But it was not a look of appreciation as much as it was shock.  The shock of imminent hypovolemic collapse kind of shock.  Seeing a ghost kind of shock.

“Dude, are you all right?” She pushed him back against the wall.  If he was about to pass out – which looked possible – he probably outweighed her by some sixty pounds and she didn’t want to have to catch him.  This way at least he wouldn’t hit his head.  “Sit down before you fall down. Are you diabetic or something?”  Fucking Corey had her fucking phone – but she could get someone in the bar to call if he was --

“Audrey?” Faint, but clear.  As if he recognized her.

As if he’d missed her.  Oh, _lucky_ Audrey.

“Not Audrey, sorry.”  Dana backed away, testing, but he stood on his own.  “Get your blood sugar checked,” she advised. “Your meds are way off.”

 

Duke watched as the woman – _Audrey_! – took a stool at a prominent corner of the bar.  Slid one leg over top of the other, turned her shoulders open to the room.  She ordered only water.  She may as well have hung a sign: Open for Business.

It was Audrey.  She was Audrey, Duke was certain of it.  The way his heart banged against his chest only confirmed it.

Audrey.  Back again after two goddamn _years_ missing.

Not Audrey – and ohmygod there it was.  Audrey – as Audrey – was gone, replaced by this creature with Audrey’s face and Audrey’s eyes and….

Duke sat, his legs near to giving out underneath him again.  Reaction warred in him – she was back, she was gone.  Two fucking years and he’d just been getting used to the idea that they wouldn’t see her again for another twenty-five, and here she was.  Alive and whole and so staringly beautiful – and she wasn’t Audrey.

Duke watched as recognition flitted across several faces, as locals in the bar recalled Audrey Parker, and tried to fit this woman with the black hair and skin tight jeans, ripped with ragged holes that Duke would guess were real and not designer artifice, with their image of the proper professional –nice– former FBI agent. 

He watched as a real drink arrived for her.  He watched as young Ben Hanover tried his luck, but he soon had to share her attention with Barb and Jack Sutton – who, Duke recalled, had to be careful he didn’t call trains off their tracks to run them down when they argued.  Ben went back to his buddies.

Both the not-Audrey woman and the Suttons soon separated, unsettled and disturbed looks between them.  Barb petted Jack on one arm as they passed by Duke, calming him.  She looked up at Duke, confusion and hurt in her eyes.

Duke stopped her before she could say anything.  “I see her.”  They probably didn’t know anything about Audrey’s unique history, may not have even known about Audrey’s abduction and disappearance.  They just knew that they’d reached out to a former friend to find –

It wasn’t her.  She looked like her, the face was the same, but she wasn’t her; didn’t remember them, and didn’t speak the language.

“How?” Barb asked.

“This is Haven,” Jack said, the only explanation needed and patted his wife’s hand.  “Does Nathan…?”

He cut himself off at Duke’s expression and flicked “No.” 

They backed away, exchanged looks that Duke had labeled _könnte schlimmer sein_ – looks he’d seen people in Haven wear more and more as the years ticked by and the Troubles still went on.  Not schadenfreude, but maybe a more compassionate version of it.  Could be worse.  We have problems, but life could be worse.  Nothing to do but hold on until the ride was over.

But no one reached out to help their neighbor, join forces, or work together.

Not since Audrey.

What in God’s name was he going to tell Nathan?

 

Nathan regarded the two steps up from the Gull’s gravelled parking lot to the wooden deck and walkway as something of a curse.  He’d fallen and tripped down them more times than he could count, leaving the bar.  It didn’t hurt anything except his pride – and there were enough professional level drinkers in this town that the Chief of Police falling on his face on the way home hardly attracted notice.

Falling up them, on the way in, that could start talk.

Goddamn Duke knew better than to call him after fucking six p.m.

‘Come’ he’d insisted.  Without explanation or any clue what he was walking in on.  ‘Pour your drunken ass into a taxi if you have to, but come’.  And hung up, ignoring what Nathan was sure would have been perfectly reasonable reasons why Nathan was in no way obligated to work overtime or show up when goddamn Duke snapped his goddamned fingers.

Call the bloody cops if he needed to.  Not him.

One step at a time.  Hand on the post, he didn’t even need to crawl.

The bar wasn’t in flames.  Nathan lifted a hand to a couples’ ‘Chief.’ greeting as they left the restaurant for their car.  No one was running.  No one was screaming.

Whatever Duke wanted, it had better be good.

Inside, it looked like an ordinary Thursday evening.  Nathan crossed his arms and leaned up against one of the interior posts – the better not to stagger and fall – but also to convey something of his disgust as Duke filed across the room towards him.

Nathan shied away from the look in the other man’s eyes as he got closer.  The judgment. Duke had no right to judge him.  And he could keep his fucking pity for his own sorry life.

“Am I wrong?” Duke asked.

What?  What the fuck now?  Nathan didn’t even bother the half dozen or so possible responses  that rose in him, quips to slashing insult.  It was too easy and he was too… beat.  Beaten.

“Wrong about what?”

“Can’t you see her? Brunette, at the bar.”

Duke had called him here about a girl?  A girl?!  Seriously, Nathan was going to make Duke pay for this.

He looked, saw who Duke meant.  A slip of a girl with ripped jeans, untidy black hair in need of a strong comb, and a garish black leather jacket with red lightning bolts.  And Audrey’s profile.

“You’re wrong.”  Nathan could see the resemblance.  She looked like Audrey.  Much more than the others; the others who had popped in and out of the corner of his vision, a tone of voice from around a corner, a laugh with just the right mixture of affection and rue and lilt.  Just enough resemblance to make his throat close and his heart leap out of his chest,  but always, always – once he looked again – not her.  The same with this woman – not her.  “Seriously, Duke?”

Not to mention that there was a quarter century still to wait.

If this was some attempt on Duke’s part to interfere with Nathan’s life – judgment after all on his drinking – then this might be the point where he and Duke were going to have to part ways for good.

“Look closer,” Duke pleaded.  Nathan concentrated instead on Duke.  This was important to him, obviously – nothing to do with Nathan, really.  Duke faced away from her, surveying the rest of the restaurant over Nathan’s shoulder, probably not seeing it at all.

Duke and Audrey had been friends too.  Nathan sometimes forgot.  He wasn’t the only one she left behind.  He put his hand on his friend’s shoulder, squeezed – he hoped – lightly.  He almost never made physical gestures like that. This seemed to call for it.

“Fine.” The word slipped out before he knew it. He’d been about to shut Duke down, walk away, deny the possibility outright. But it occurred to him that Duke needed to know, to see for himself. And it wouldn’t hurt him to give Duke that much. She couldn’t hurt Nathan, but if Duke got his hopes up… the consequences could be catastrophic. Literally.

 

Dana looked back over her shoulder as a wonderful smell accompanied the clink of a plate landing on the bar behind her.  Grilled shrimp, and fries.  Someone was buying her dinner?  “I didn’t order this.”

The tall intense diabetic leaned forward, one foot up on something.  His smile was suddenly intimate.  “On the house.”

“You?”  She smiled, she couldn’t help it.  The menu here in Haven was decidedly thin – she’d already rejected the fishermen, the tourists and the boys.  And people kept giving her that look that she didn’t understand.  That ‘can’t place you’ look.  It threw her off her game.  But of her remaining choices…

“Welcome to the Gull.  I’m Duke Crocker.  This is my place.”

“Dana Bellamy.”  She held up a hand already holding a shrimp tail, her mouth full.  “Are we supposed to shake?” she grinned, when that seemed to be his plan.  “Sorry.  Starving.  And these are really good.”

“I’ll tell Lanny you said so.”  He helped himself to one of her fries, another intimate grin.

“Is it really Duke, or is that a nickname?”  Duke was a dog’s name, in Dana’s experience.  What kind of parent would name their child that?

“It’s real.”  The look that flickered through his brown eyes revealed the same thought, unexpressed or even acknowledged.

Oh, this was trouble.

This was going to be so much fun, one side of her said, but some other voice inside her was taking up arms – warning her to run and not look back. She played fair and square with her dates. She did not want their money. She only wanted their company for as long as they wanted hers. She was not particular about who paid for the drinks or the meals, and the beds usually came with roofs over her head – but she’d been broker than this and survived. She’d always survive.

She had skills beyond her hair and her face and her legs.  She did _this_ because… she could, and because it quieted all the other voices in her head; a man who wanted her, adored her, made her feel good – made her feel good.  She saw herself as he – they – saw her, and it was enough.  When they stopped seeing her as pretty, starting seeing her as something grubby and worthless, then it was over and she was gone.

Sometimes with just the twenty year old Suzuki and the change in her pocket.

She did not love them, neither did she despise them.  And neither, as in never, did she feel this instant ‘click’ inside her of something just right falling into place.

That felt like trouble, because that felt like it was permanent and would hurt when it broke.

“Can I get a refill,” the man beside her called, rudely, tapping his empty glass on the bar.  She’d seen him come in a few minutes ago, already barely able to stand.  Duke had met him near the door, then surprised her by not throwing him out again right away.  Served him, straight double.  Even from two seats away he reeked of alcohol.

“Don’t you think you’ve had enough?”

Dana cursed her tongue and her temper.  She liked men.  She liked a lot of different sizes and kinds and styles of men, and amused herself with their faults and foibles.  But once in a while, for no reason she could ever pinpoint, she came across one that made her instantly hostile.  It wasn’t just the drink.  Damon, in London, had never been actually sober the entire time she spent with him. But he sang such lovely songs of love and loss when three sheets to the wind that she’d stayed for four months.

This one – tall too, skeletally thin that the too bulky sweater and jacket did not hide, square-jawed and icy dead eyes – she would have picked him from a line-up of ladykillers.  The literal kind.

“Dana Bellamy, this is Chief of Police Nathan Wuornos.”

She blinked at Duke,  now acting like he was master of ceremonies or something.  There were sudden layers of warning and fear (?) in Duke’s voice, the laughing intimacy gone like morning dew.  Chief of Police?  That explained why Duke hadn’t thrown him out – but she was not going to be used to pay off whatever debt Duke owed him.  Which is what it felt like, when the Chief of Police held out his hand for her to shake – like she was being introduced to a trick, in all senses of the word.

She stood, pulled out her cash.  “Lovely shrimp,” she said, even though the plate was barely touched.  “How much do I owe you?”

“On the house,” Duke said faintly.

Dana put a five down on the bar.  “For that little girl you made do your dirty work.  Good night.”

 

Dana's dramatic flourish of an exit was ruined by the over-choked carb on her bike, right now – half-way between running hot and completely cold – it flooded at the first touch of the starter. Goddamn it, she should have taken that thing apart a month ago.

She pulled her helmet off as Duke and the police chief came out to the lot. "Either of you know a good bike mechanic in this –" bit it back, "little town?"

 

Life was funny, Dana mused as she wandered around the little apartment above the restaurant. Duke had fallen over himself to offer her whatever she wanted – getting the bike fixed, a place to stay in the meantime, whatever she wanted from the restaurant – and then he'd left. She could hear his hissed argument with police chief coming from down below, but not what they said. She recognized obligations, and across the globe the care and feeding of obnoxious - not to say outright bent - cops took some effort. A little flattery, a lot of free booze. But it struck her as funny the way Duke had installed her here and gone back to the other man. She was definitely second on the list of Duke's priorities.

The clothes in the closet were her size, or would have been if she'd been eating more regularly. Not her style though – blazers and pants. Blech. Even the dresses, all three of them, very mid-west and conservative. Conservative heels. Winter boots that looked brand new, and something you would give to a kid that had to walk through snow to school. Uphill, both ways.

No food in the fridge, and except for the dust, nearly everything else looked like someone was just away for the weekend. The kitchen area – kitchenette – she'd seen better in most fleabag motels across the country – was inexpertly scrubbed after being covered in fingerprint powder. She recognized the traces of carbon black in the cracks in the grout, in grooves between the boards of the floor. No suspicious brown stains that she could see, at least.

She found what she was looking for, without knowing she was even looking, in a drawer beside the bed. Pictures. Duke and a smug-looking black woman. Duke and a blonde. Blonde and another man, looking at each other, looking like they could eat each other. The four of them, posed around a table on the deck below.

No, the deck here, on the second floor. With all four of them crowded together to make the picture, Duke's arm outstretched to hold the camera.

Happy smiling people. Her hands drifted over the photos – an uneasy sense of longing somewhere in the back of her throat. It was like a catalogue photo, or a tourist brochure. Come to Maine! Pretty people with pretty happy lives. Doubly uneasy, because the blonde could have been her twin.

They said that everyone had a doppelganger somewhere in the world. Given the way Dana had roamed over most of it, perhaps it wasn't surprising she would find her own, but it still creeped her the hell out. No one would have put Dana's life on a tourist brochure. Dana herself didn't even keep the few photos that people tried to give her. To remember them, maybe? To remind her of the good times when the bad times came.

Fuck that. When the bad times came, Dana was so outta there.

Still, that little ache in her throat for the pretty happy woman in the photo. Dana wished they could have met.

Duke was back – she'd heard him come up the stairs, come inside. She showed him the photo. "Audrey, I presume?" The lucky Audrey whom Duke had mistaken her for at first glance. "This was her place?"

Duke nodded. "For a little while." He'd brought a bottle of wine with him – he uncorked it and started pouring two glasses.

Dana forced herself to shed her jacket, unzip the unsexy but necessary biking boots. The voices inside her were screaming at her to run and keep on running. "You're forgiven."

Something else, though, held her like a lock. Part of it was undeniably the attraction she felt. Already she wanted his hands on her body and his mouth on hers. She wanted to light the fire in the fireplace and let him take her on the braided rug in front of it. Part of it, though, was not even about him. She felt it, she just couldn't put a word to it yet.

"I apologize. For what?"

"For mistaking me for her." Dana looked at it again. It was like looking at an alternate reality version of herself. What her life could have been – if only.

He laughed, under his breath. "No one would mistake you for her."

From the baklava number of layers in that, Dana guessed that had something to do with his argument with the drunken police chief. "Let me guess. She's wanted by the police."

Duke barked a surprised laugh as he handed her the glass of wine and sat down in the armchair beside her, while she had curled her feet under her on the couch. "You could say that."

"What happened to her?" Dana ran a finger from his thumb up the inside of his arm to his elbow. She was pleased to see the way he went absolutely still, then turned a narrowed intense look at her. There was starting the fire, and then there was starting a fire. Talking about some dead girlfriend was not her usual strategy. It seemed to be working, though.

But Duke stood suddenly, leaving the wine glass behind.

"Don't," he barked, holding one hand out as if to ward her off. "Nathan was right. This is a really bad idea."

Nathan? … Chief of Police Nathan Wor-something or other, she recalled. "Duke – I'm sorry. I didn't mean anything –" She'd misjudged how sensitive he was on the subject of said dead girlfriend, obviously. "My mistake. I'm sorry." She picked up her boots, and her jacket. "I'll go." Where was a problem to be faced – later – but the Suzuki's engine was probably fully cold by now. She could get it started. If nothing else she would walk it down the road to a hill. Start it that way.  
She'd done it before.

"Don't go." It was both order and plea.

"Man, she really did a number on you, didn't she?" Dana closed her eyes. That was… not polite. And not what she'd meant to say. "Dude – Duke. I can't stay, here, looking – even to myself – like we could be twins. Not when you are still this messed up. It's not fair." That may have been why the voices were still screaming. He wasn't looking at her, adoring her, wanting her. He wanted Audrey. "It's just too confusing."

"I'm not the one who is confused," he said.


	2. Somebody  That I Used to Know

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dana, meet Haven.

 

“I’m not the one who is confused,” he said.

She stepped in closer to him.  His chin came up as she deliberately invaded his space, but he didn’t back away. “Me?  Where am I confused?”

Such a complicated look.  “That’s a long story.”  He searched her face, looking for something… and not finding it.  Dana backed off.  She was pushing too hard.  She knew  it.  And she didn’t like the feeling that she was coming up short with what he expected of her.

She dropped the boots and her jacket again.  Come, go, on, off – she was getting dizzy.  He seemed determined to keep his distance, at the same time as he insisted that she stay.  She knew what she wanted though.

She fingered the upper edge of his undershirt, not peeking out from under as much as planted there like a target. Peel off all his layers like an artichoke to get to the heart of the matter. She ran her fingernail under the stitching, a tiny vibration they could both feel. “So what’s the story with the cop?  Does he have something on you?”

“Don’t you like cops?”

“Not much.  Do you?”  Three chains around his neck – they weren’t even jewelry.  Whatever they meant to him was lost on her.  She recognized the Chinese monkey king on a little square pendant – she’d read it or read about it somewhere or other.  A journey toward enlightenment or something.  But they all felt lovely – strong and warmed from his body – as she curled them around her finger, brushing up against his skin just lightly as she did so.

Again a complicated, rueful look.  “Nathan’s all right.”  With full knowledge of what she was doing, of course.  He didn’t stop her.

“ _Nathan_ is a hot mess.”

“That’s a bad thing?”

She laughed at him.  “Yes.”  She pulled on the chains with that entwined finger, bringing his head down towards hers.

 

He kissed her.  She kissed him, met him halfway.  A nice kiss.  Nothing magical, nothing special.

Nathan had been right, of course.  Their – discussion – in the parking lot, about how she was not Audrey, didn’t know anything about the Troubles and it would be impossible to just tell her.  Audrey had spent so much time and anguish trying to figure out her identity, but she never would have believed it any other way.  They needed proof.

He didn’t know what he’d expected, kissing her.  He’d flirted with Audrey endlessly.  He’d teased her about her work habits, wanted to look under her shell for the passionate woman he knew lurked there.  But then there’d been Evi, and then before he knew it – she was gone.  And then his life, life in general in Haven, had fallen down a black hole of the Troubles.  Haven was no longer a haven for anyone – troubled or not – as the town fractured down lines seen and unseen.  Normals against Troubled against… some shadowy conspiracy of power he and Nathan had not cracked even yet.

Usually, Duke needed little persuasion to follow through with an offer like that kiss had been.  Helena/Beatty notwithstanding.  That had made him cautious about the girls he took home for a couple months, but … this was Audrey, in one form or another, and he didn’t want to screw this up. 

She walked away when he did not say anything.  Wandered away from the door, so he relaxed a little.  There was no way he would let her just ride out of town, even if it took some sort of drastic measure.  Up to and including something like tying her up and keeping her here by force. 

The Chief of Police owed him a couple favors, after all.

He’d be just as glad if he could charm her into staying, though.  She seemed… open to the idea, at least.  But that kiss had been like – no, not like, was – kissing a stranger.  And maybe she was right too; he was getting confused.

He joined her on the deck, where the last light of the day turned indigo.  Light spilled out on the water from the deck below them, along with the pleasant chatter of his customers; here was entirely private without being intimidatingly silent.  He offered her the glass of wine again.

“You must have loved her very much.”

There was a trembling uncertainty in her voice he didn’t understand.  He parked himself against the railing beside her, facing back to the apartment while she faced the water.  It was no accident that he brushed up against her elbow.  She didn’t pull away.  “I did.  I do.  As a friend.  You saw the photos.  She and Nathan –”  He stopped, didn’t know what to say. 

Something had happened with Audrey and Nathan between the time she found out about his father and his curse, and when she’d disappeared.  He was very afraid that it was about his curse, and the way Kyle Hopkins had died by his hand.  That, despite his  promises to her, despite his hatred of his father, even despite his attraction to her – she believed in his curse even more than he did, and that he would, one day, hunt her down as his father had.  Something that had launched Nathan like a heat seeking missile after him when she was abducted.

She bit back a surprised laugh.  “That was Nathan?  The same Nathan who…?”  her hand flopped over, confused.   “Oh, god, you’re not going to make me feel sorry for the S.O.B., are you?”  She sipped the wine.  “Wait a minute –” and she turned a scalpel of a look on him, one he recognized as it pinned him like an insect to a corkboard.  “You called him.  Told him I was there.  That’s why….  Jesus.  You must really hate him.”  The same look she’d used on him around the campfire, out hunting wendigos, after his confrontation with Nathan, and before he’d discovered he didn’t know Audrey Parker _at all_.

“I don’t hate him.”  After two years in hell, he didn’t even know what to call his relationship with Nathan.  He hadn’t before them.

“What does he have on you?”

Okay, this conversation was getting away from him.  There was just too much.  “He doesn’t- It’s not like that.”

“Cops are cops are cops.”

Duke smiled to himself, realizing something for the first time. “You ask nearly anyone in this town, and they’ll tell you that Duke Crocker is a low-life smuggler and general layabout. Two, three years ago I would have said exactly the same.” He realized at that moment that he hadn’t gone on a run or done any sort of deal but order supplies for the Gull in two years. He was turning into a law-abiding citizen, of all the freakish things. “Just – give him a chance.”

 

Dana stepped one leg in between his.  “I don’t want to talk about him anymore.”  This time, his arms went around her much more naturally, and she felt like she’d won something.  He kissed her, exploring with his lips and tongue as she felt the heat build within her.

Evidently he did, too, as his eyes remained closed and he ran his lips through his teeth after they broke apart.  “What do you want to talk about?” he asked, ironically.

The voices had stopped screaming at her at least.  They were quiet.  Unusually so, and she couldn’t quite read their mood or intention.  It was such a relief that it made her heady, like when a sixty pound pack was finally put down for the day.  She wanted to bounce around like the astronauts on the moon.

Her laugh came from somewhere deep when he picked her up in his arms, one under her knees, one just above her waist.  She weighed nothing, but she wrapped her arms around his neck to pull herself closer.  He was too bright to look at directly and she could not meet what he was giving her with his eyes.

He laid her on the sheets, throwing back the dusty cover to the floor.  She clung, trying to continue to kiss him, until he pulled up her shirt over her head and breaking her arms grip around his neck.  He kissed her again, starting where jaw met throat and tracing his lips down her neck.  He hit one spot, along the cord there, that made her groan, sending an electric shock from there all the way to her feet.

“Right there?” he laughed at her, and did it again. 

“Duke,” she breathed.  She held off his third attempt, murmuring objections – too much of a good thing.

“I’ll be back,” he said, against her skin.  Instead he continued down, down to the edge of her bra, and with a deft practiced movement, freed one breast and then the other.

“You’ve done this before,” she accused him with a smile.

Deep brown eyes answered her with complex sincerity.  “No.  Not this.”

She refused to let him take off her bra – unhooking it herself behind her back.  She’d done this before too.  He took off his shirt at her direction, and then she rewarded herself with peeling off his undershirt.

“Oh.”  Not what she expected.  The skull with butterflies and flowers he could explain later.  The verse under his left arm she didn’t bother with.  She was too distracted by the lacings of scars across his chest and the shiny patch of an old bullet wound.  She didn’t even know she said his name again as her fingers traced out his old pain.  “Were you in the war?”

“There was a war,” he said, but it didn’t sound like agreement.

“I’m sorry.  I shouldn’t have asked.”

“Why shouldn’t you ask?”

“Duke, shut up and kiss me.”  She reached for him.  His mouth razed her throat while his hand undid the buttons of her jeans.  She did the same for him until they both had to stop to kick the final remnants of their clothes to the floor.

She refused when he wanted to position her on top, planted her shoulders firmly against the pillows.  She reached for, and held, the curving metal of the bedhead.  A position she knew few men could resist.

He crawled up the length of her body, starting at her feet and laughing at her ticklishness there, and the back of her knees.  He teased her thighs with his hands, alternating long firm strokes up her muscles with the silky caress of a down stroke, only to reverse the pattern just for the surprise of it.

She wanted to touch him, desperately, but now she’d committed herself to this position.  More so, when his hands curved around her  bottom, and she refused to turn over at his suggestion. His eyes questioned, but nothing further.  She was a quivering mess by the time he made it to her breasts, after the crease where thigh met abdomen, after tracing the curves of her belly around to hip, after sweeping hip to waist to breastbone with his lips.

“Duke, please,”  He hadn’t even really touched her yet and she was melting like cotton candy at the touch of his tongue.  “Please.”

“Buddha says:  Do not dream of the future.  Concentrate the mind on the present moment.”

“Evil, evil man.” Abandoning the bedhead, her fingers left long white streaks up his back.  She ran her fingers through his hair, but it just flopped back into its own messy original position.  She forgave him when he captured one breast with his mouth, and detained the other with his hand.  Something hot enough to burn shot from there to her very center, something nearly forgotten. Pure and primitive and real, more real than anything she’d ever felt before.

“Now, Duke,” she whispered. God, now.  He heard her and she moaned for him as his fingers found her hot and wet, moaned his name as he slid inside her, filled her where she was empty.

“Audrey,” he said.

 

“Dana.”

Duke ducked the shoe aimed at his head.

“Dana, I’m sorry.”

Caught the other one that followed right on its heel.

“Stop. Now wait a minute!” when she started aiming the wine at him too. He couldn’t help but smile at the ridiculous scene they made, even while he was in the middle of it. “That is yours. And a bloody good year, too.” He’d gone to some effort picking it out before coming up here. The bottle landed back on the side table with a hard clunk.

“You think this is funny?!”

“It’s a little funny…” he laughed, offered a hopeful eyebrow for her to join him.

She threw his pants at him instead, balled them up and launched them expertly across the length of the room.  “Get out.”

Actually, Duke had been waiting for that move.  If she’d been really angry they could have been launched into the bay.  He put the pants on, all the while keeping an eye out for any further missiles.  He stepped towards her, his arms displayed palm out, no hidden weapons.  Smiled.  She held no hostage but herself, but for all that she might as well have been holding a bomb.  “Dana.”

“You think it matters now how many times you say it?!”  Dana clutched the sheet tighter around herself, dramatically strewn across the floor and bed still.  “Stay the fuck away from me, Crocker.  You freak.  I’m not your dead girlfriend and you’d better get that through your thick skull.”

A step closer still.  “She’s not dead.”  And never his, though at this point that seemed too fine a distinction to matter.  He’d loved Audrey, lost her and maybe he was only recognizing it now.  But Dana was not Audrey.

_She_ was back.  She wasn’t Audrey, but she always helped the Troubled regardless of her name, her memories, and right now – for purely selfish reasons – Duke needed that to be true.  They were all just barely hanging on; him, Nathan, the rest of this cursed small town.  Could be worse, indeed.  But that was an optimists’ view of hell, too.

Dana was trembling, barely able to hold herself together, clutching onto the sheet not just to cover herself, but as some sort of anchor. Another step, two, and he gathered her slowly to his chest. “I’m so sorry,” he said, stroking her hair. “She was taken. Two years ago. I know you’re not her. I just…” In truth, there was nothing he could say to justify what he’d done. He’d let go, just a little, let himself believe, let himself trust in a way he hadn’t since Kyle Hopkins had died at his feet. “I’m sorry.”

 

“Then what – no, never mind. Don’t tell me. Get out.” She had news for him. Two years abducted meant dead.

It was the laugh that caught her, held her. About the worst mistake a man could make while – doing that – and he could… She didn’t understand him. He could laugh about it? It wasn’t that he didn’t know what he done. His apology was evident, and genuine, and even as he kissed her hair his lips strayed down to her temple, tiny kisses caressed her skin towards her ear.

“Stop it.”  Weak, and meaningless.  “I’m still mad at you.”  She wasn’t.  She’d known about Audrey.  Seen her face in the mirror.  So yes, he had an excuse.  Not a reason, but at least an excuse.  But that laugh…

Where was the tragedy?  Why wasn’t he devastated, guilt-ridden, grief-stricken… like the bloody potted police chief, _Nathan_?

How could he laugh?

Dana ached to possess his secret.  To laugh at loss.  To feel it, absorb it and still be strong enough to live again, whole.  God, she wanted to laugh again, like that, the way he did.  Like she meant it.

“Come back to bed,” he said, low and resonating through her like a tuning fork. 

She let the sheet drop, reaching over his shoulders and kissing him.  He laughed again in surprise, pleasure and surprise, as they both fell towards the bed, laughed deep in his throat without breaking off the kiss.

She would stay at least until she learned his secret.

 

Donald McCutcheon looked at her like she’d lost her mind.  “Lemon juice?”

“Lemon juice.  Like half juice and half water.  And a pot big enough to put everything in.”  Everything being the carbs from her bike.  Boiling everything in lemon juice scrubbed the varnish off like nothing else.  If she was going to pull it apart anyway, it was going back together clean.

McCutcheon looked over her shoulder at Duke.  He was Duke’s friend, he was lending her his shop and his tools – she tried not to take offence.   

Duke only shrugged.  “It’s probably easier to just go along with it,” he said to McCutcheon, who – fifty, pot-bellied and grey whiskered – gave Duke a dark look, then muttered something under his breath and wandered off.  He was the only one Duke had trusted his Land Rover to, he said,  up until a few months ago at least.  Something had happened that he’d suddenly retired and the shop sat unused.  Duke was evasive about what exactly.  But he should be able to help her out with the bike repairs.

“Call me if anything … strange… happens.”  Duke didn’t look at her.  He might have been talking to his side mirror.  But since this was the first time in thirty-six hours they’d be more than an arm’s reach from each other, Dana forgave him.

“Why?  You think he’s gonna want some of this?”  She teased lightly, patting her backside.  She didn’t like the idea of stepping in between whatever was going on.  Especially when neither of them wanted to talk about it.  It was odd, but Dana got the distinct impression it involved her somehow, despite how she’d never met either of them forty-eight hours ago.  Of course, that meant it involved Audrey Parker somehow.

“Don’t worry.  Dirty old men I can handle.  I have a strict _look but don’t touch_ policy.” 

“Call me.”

McCutcheon wandered back with an aluminum pot big enough to hold multiples of Maine lobsters.  She smiled wide at him.  “Perfect.  Now what about a stove?”

 

McCutcheon got his money’s worth while she pulled the bike apart, Dana figured.  He sat on a stool in the office and watched from a distance as she huffed and puffed and wrenched and cursed until she had the seat off, and the carbs wrenched loose.  She couldn’t see where his hands were, she didn’t want to know, but she never caught him at anything, even after she deliberately turned her back, bent over for him.

Apparently, that wasn’t why he watched.

That was strange, Dana mused, amused, but she didn’t think it qualified as an excuse to call Duke. 

McCutcheon’s garage was a mess though, all his tools were heaped on top of each other like some misguided modern art installation. Some – his wrenches for instance – balled together somehow, like yarn after a kitten attack. He knew where each and every one was though, directing her with hand gestures when she requested one. The tool sculptures fell apart from each other whenever she tried to take one, to pick it up. She spent almost as much time organizing his drawers as she did fixing the bike. McCutcheon didn’t seem to mind the invasion of his space, just kept watching.

She ducked down behind her bike when a beat up old Bronco pulled up in front of the garage, disgorging the police chief, and a crying, disheveled teenage girl, who flew past Dana on her way past her father and into the house.

Chief Nathan something-or-other saw her anyway, looked her up and down.  Dana _looked_  at him right back, returning glare for glare.  He looked – better.  Stood capably on his own two feet at least.  Dana was aware of the grease not only under her fingernails, but in streaks up her arms and across her shirt.  She would just bet she had it on her face too, from the way he stared.  “Chief.”

He turned to McCutcheon instead, who had finally stirred off his stool to come out to meet Nathan.  Their conversation was low, and not really for her ears. But what the hell, they were standing not ten feet from her.  It wasn’t as if she wasn’t here first.  She caught bits about fights at school, things needed to change.  Control her temper, or get her some help.

She also noted how McCutcheon seemed to back off and shut down as Nathan tried to tell him what to do – something that the cop looked utterly blind to.  Both of them just got angrier with each other as the discussion went on, until Dana dropped a wrench on the cement floor of the garage.  It rang like the closing bell of a boxing match, and they both turned to look at her.  She bent over with exaggerated grace to pick it up.

“Don’t mind me.”

“This doesn’t concern you,” the chief said.

“It does concern that girl, and you’re talking about her – behind her back – like you can control her without her consent or even input,” Dana bit back.

“She’s my little girl.  She does what I tell her to do.”  McCutcheon added.

“Since when?”  Dana judged the girl’s age as fourteen or fifteen.  “Not for a few months now?”  Not since whatever happened, happened?  There may well be girls in the world that age who did follow their father’s commands, but they weren’t the kind who got hauled home by the police for fighting.

McCutcheon grew even redder in the face. Dana felt an odd tingle in her hand, and realized the wrench she was holding was quivering like it was alive. A great clanging noise – Dana flinched – of a hundred wrenches being dropped, a whole truckload spilled… and all the tools she’d spent a couple hours sorting were stacked together behind her in a twisting sculpture of steel that looked like the solid stainless flame of an enormous bonfire.

McCutcheon walked away.

Nathan grabbed her arm and pulled her out from underneath.  It stayed upright though.  From a couple steps back it looked a lot more threatening, as if they were reaching for her specifically, a wave about to break.

It was incredibly beautiful, and preposterous.  Impossible, over-balanced, alive and a work of art.  It took her breath away.

 “That man has _a lot_ of tools.” 

Where that came from she didn’t know.  This was – strange.  This was probably something she could call Duke about.

This wasn’t strange. This was impossible.

 “Welcome to Haven,” Nathan said.

She looked over her shoulder at him.  Now he was making jokes, too?  He wasn’t looking at her, or even at the sculpture of tools.  He looked at something internal, his eyes resting where his hand still held her arm.  She pulled herself free, rolled down her sleeves to hide her grease covered arms.  Something else was more important than a magically constructed seven foot tall sculpture of steel tools?  “You don’t seem so surprised,” she said, slowly.

“It’s called a Trouble. A lot of people here have them.”

Dana turned back to the tools. Amongst the stack was every loose bolt and screw in the place, along with several pieces from her bike, parts that had been neatly laid so that she could find them again were now deeply embedded amongst everything else.  “But that’s my chain…” she whined, just a little.


	3. Cathy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cathy has troubles...

The bike didn’t go back together without it.  “I need my chain.”

Dana ducked out of range when Nathan tried to grab her again, as she reached out to the unbalanced mass of steel.  “Careful,” he muttered. 

Hmm.  True, the thing probably weighed a couple of tons.  Then again, her voices were muttering again themselves, warnings she did not understand.  Dana took out her phone – Duke’s gift – and took a few pictures.  It was hard to capture the action of the thing, but she wanted to remember this.  This she wouldn’t forget but… still.  People she could and did leave behind.  Miracles were much rarer.  She wanted a permanent record.

“What are you going to do with those?”

She didn’t know if it was his authority figure or him himself, but he certainly had this talent of instantly getting her back up. Whatever she wanted, she was about to say, and he had no right to stop her. She could send them to the whole world with a couple of keystrokes. “I’m sending them to Duke. He is not going to believe this.” Of course, the tool sculpture was one thing, and remarkable in itself. Proving how it went together, that was another thing entirely.

“Duke already knows about it.  About McCutcheon.  Why do you think he brought you here?”

To fix her bike.

No?

Dana stared at the police chief.  He didn’t quite meet her eyes, but he wasn’t avoiding either.  Just sort of standing there – waiting for a firing squad to take aim or something. 

What the _fucking fuck_ was going on?

Nathan reached and tried to pull a lug wrench out of place.  It may as well have been welded there.  He tried again, and again, searching for a loose piece, something with a bit of leverage he could maybe twist loose.  There was no give in it at all.  He threw all his weight into it, nothing.  Could not make it even shift along the smooth concrete of the floor, though it didn’t seem to be attached to anything.  He would have had better luck trying to pick up his own truck by himself.

Dana watched this performance silently, which seemed to be the point.  It was for her benefit.  At the same time she had a suspicion she already knew.  Her voices counseled calm, patience.  Wait for it.

Nathan directed her with a gesture to stand beside him, a little in front of him.  Carefully did not try to grab her again, Dana noted, with some relief.  “Please,” he said.  She did as he asked.

“Now you,” he said. “Take back your chain.”

The whole works fell apart at her touch; tons of steel came crashing down and scattered across the floor, dropped from height.  Released from a spell.  Dana leapt backwards, crashing into Nathan.  Who spread his arms wide, but still caught her from falling just by being there to crash against.

“Oh.”  Gathered her feet back under herself.

All of McCutcheon’s earlier collections had fallen apart for her too, she realized.  At the time, she hadn’t known… at the time McCutcheon had sat and watched too.  _McCutcheon_ had known.

She rounded on Nathan.  He was closer.  “You knew?  You all knew?”

“Guessed.”

So, somehow, this _was_ about her.  She’d sensed it earlier, but no one had volunteered to let her in on the secret.

“Wait, before you –” Nathan started.

“Before  I what?” she ground out.  What she was, was about to explode.

He ignored that.  “It’s not something we could just… spring on you.  Duke wanted to tell you everything.  I told him to wait and see.  Not everyone can accept what happens around here.”

Dana let her temper go, just a little.  The voices chided her for not paying attention.  She was missing something.  But, Nathan appeared sincere and open.

“Why do you get to tell Duke what to do?”  That wasn’t the real question, but it was the one that occurred to her.

He scrubbed at the back of his head, shaking it ironically.  “I don’t.”

Well, this had been enlightening.  Dana indicated over her shoulder, vaguely in the direction of where her pot of carburetor parts were boiling away on McCutcheon’s barbeque, mostly in a direction away from the confusing, infuriating police chief, “My carbs are just about done.”

He smiled.  Small, hidden away almost immediately, but she definitely detected a lip movement there.  Innn-teresting.  “Tell Duke…” he started again, backing up towards his truck, picking his way carefully through the scattered tools.  “Never mind.”

“What?”

“Never mind.  I’ll… call him.”  He got in, drove away.

Useless man.  He was not going to call.  She was going to have to beat it out of Duke one way or another – what went on between those two – _after_ she got some answers from him about Haven and the Troubles and – _ohshit_ – what it all had to do with her.  Because that was the real question she’d forgotten to ask, avoided asking herself.  Who was she that he could guess she would be able to … do that?  Undo the magic. 

 

Dana rescued the carburetor parts from the lemon juice bath, doused them with WD-40, and started putting them back together.  There was no way she would get her bike back today, not with the state the garage was in.  And she didn’t know if she trusted that chain again after all it had been through.  A new one was not cheap though.

Gradually, Dana became aware of a pair of young eyes watching her – the teenage girl, now scrubbed clean of makeup and tear streaks equally, dressed in working jeans and slouchy blouse.  Pretty, going to be beautiful. The kind of face that looked better on a 26yr old than a 16yr old, all strong lines and flat planes. Minus the puffiness and bruising on one side, of course, obviously the result of a physical fight.

“What does the other girl look like?” Dana asked, without raising her attention from seating the gasket.

“When I find them again, I’ll let you know.”

Them.  Yeah, girls tended to hunt in packs.  “Someone called the cops on you?”

“I guess.”

“The secret is:  fight in public if you want help.  Fight in private if you want to finish it.”

The girl stared at her a few moment.  Not, apparently, the advice she’d been expecting.  “What do you know about it?”

“Oh, I’m old.  I know lots of shit.  Ask me.”

“Aren’t you supposed to tell me not to fight?”

Dana smiled.  “Can you find a belt ratchet in that mess?”  She indicated over her shoulder with a thumb.  “Which, by the way, was not my fault.  I had everything in drawers until your father came by.”

“Yeah, he does that.”  A little bitter, but a lot accepting.  The girl moved closer, enough to look over the pile.  It didn’t seem to matter to her that her father could… defy the laws of nature.  As if it was just an annoying habit, a little embarrassing maybe.  Like family karaoke nights.

Dana turned and looked at her for the first time.  “I’m Dana,” she said.

“Cathy,” she said, offering Dana the ratchet.

“Hi, Cathy.”

 

A walk along the beach solved a lot of problems.  Maine’s rocky coast did not offer a lot by way of sand, but there were trails and even the jagged rocks made you think about where you were putting your feet, and stop thinking about what you were thinking and worrying about so hard.  It turned out that Cathy’s mother had packed up and left a few months ago.  Cathy herself didn’t know if that was the cause or the result of her father’s ‘affliction’, as she called it, she only knew that ever since then – he didn’t work, he didn’t play, he didn’t talk and he didn’t do anything but sit in front of the TV and drink.  He made her do _everything_.

Dana couldn’t help but smile at this outburst.  Cathy herself was balanced on this jutting ridge of rock, arms outstretched as she walked it like a tightrope.  Half girl, half woman.  It was such a cliché but there it was, right in front of her.  Dana threw her arm around the girl’s shoulders when she jumped down, the four and half foot drop utterly inconsequential.  Cathy gave her a leery look as they walked on.

“I’m a hugger.  So sue me.”

She didn’t try to escape.

 

The fights were about Cathy’s own Trouble, the ability to ‘teleport’ – Cathy’s word, Dana only shook her head at it – jewelry from anywhere within about fifty feet, directly into her pocket, whenever she got upset.  Which inevitably led to accusations of theft, and then the fights.  Which just made her more upset.  Stuff in lockers, around necks, in a purse – just appeared in her pocket.  Most times she didn’t even know who it came from.

“Seriously?” Dana asked, then regretted it immediately, from the hurt on Cathy’s face.  “No, I’m sorry.  I believe you –”  and she did, after a blink of an eye moment to convince herself.  “It’s… This is all pretty new to me.”

Cathy pulled her hand out of her front pocket, opening her palm to show Dana the contents, two rings.  One of them on a thick chain, a man’s ring on a man’s chain; and one of them Dana’s own, thin beaten gold with three tiny blue diamonds.

Dana picked up the small ring.

“From when I first got home,” Cathy said.

“That’s…” Dana searched, aware of the vulnerable tension in the teenager.  Waiting to see if she was angry.  “Inconvenient.”  If she’d actually been a thief the talent would be invaluable, of course.  Possibilities unfolded in Dana’s mind. But then again, using this ability for any sort of gain would then automatically make you a thief.  Using it accidentally, unconsciously, only got you in a lot of… trouble.

Ohh, the elegant cruel irony.

“I see,” Dana murmured.

“It’s pretty,” Cathy said, meaning the ring.  “It looks old.”

“I suppose,” Dana replied.  In truth, she knew nothing about it.  She figured it looked like an old-fashioned engagement ring, and knew it fit her ring finger perfectly, and that’s about all.  “It’s a family thing.  I’ve just always had it.  I don’t even remember how I got it.”  Dana put it back in her pocket.

Cathy offered the other one, the one on the chain.  “I think it’s Chief Wuornos’.  I don’t want… He’s chief of police.  What if he thinks I took it on purpose?”

Dana accepted the chain.  “I think he would understand, but I’ll give to him.  Don’t worry.”  _Wuornos, Wuornos, Wuornos_.  She imprinted it on her brain.  It looked like she was fated to run into the guy more than she really wanted or liked.  She might as well remember his name.

They worked on strategies to avoid fights in the future, walking and talking.  Dana figured she could hardly be accused of theft if she gave the jewelry back, but finding the owners was sometimes difficult.  And they were always angry and violated regardless of getting their property back.  A lot, Cathy said, quite a few, figured out that she was ‘one of them’, one of the Troubled, and that was just a whole other level of trouble.

“What do you mean?”

Cathy shook her head. “People get scared. People get stupid.” A fairly adult assessment. “They don’t understand that we can’t control it, so they blame us for what happens. I mean, I guess I don’t know a lot about what goes on. But people talk. And they look, you know? They hate us and it’s not our fault.”

“Or maybe some people can control it, their own Trouble?”  Dana already didn’t like the ‘us’ and ‘them’ language Cathy used automatically.

“God, can you imagine?” Cathy laughed innocently.  “That kind of power and you could actually control it and … point it at someone?”  She shook her head.  “I know a few people I’d…” she shrugged, dismissed the thought.  “Not that I ever would,” she assured the adult walking beside her.

 

“It was like… the clouds were parting,” Dana said.

“mmm,” Duke said.

“The whole time I could just … It was like… this was what I was meant to do.”

“mmm,” said Duke.

“Are you listening to me?” She slapped him lightly on the shoulder.

Duke stopped what he was doing, concentrating on her bare breasts in his mouth, the way her heels dug into his backside, and the way his dick had been ready to come from the first few moments he’d taken her, nearly ripping each other’s clothes off as she’d pulled him into the office of the restaurant.  Her back up against the door, his pants around his ankles – no, he had not been listening to her.

“Do you want to talk or do you want to – do this?” he managed.  He knew what he wanted.  And she had started it, walking back into the restaurant after visiting McCutcheon – hours after he’d expected her back – looking like she was lit from the inside out.

He’d taken one look at her, and taken in the way she looked at him, and felt his whole world flip over on itself.  He wanted this, he wanted her, and knew at that moment that he would do _anything_ for her.

“This,” she whispered.  She kissed him, holding his face in both hands, gently, a kiss of slow sweetness.  It made his chest hurt, until he realized he’d forgotten to breathe.  “This,” she whispered again, brushing his hair out of his eyes.  No matter how many times she did it, it always fell back there, but that did not seem to discourage her.

A tentative knock on the door jarred them both, and they froze, a devilish smile creeping across Dana’s face before she buried it in his chest.  “Duke?” his bartender tried.

“Go. Away.”  Duke growled.

“The crab guy is here.  He wants a check.”

“I swear to god,” he started. But Dana pounded on his chest a couple times, and he let her down.  Slowly, making sure she knew he objected, and wasn’t finished or ready to let her go.  He did not hurry putting his pants back on.  Dana took a little longer, getting fully redressed, and Duke sighed.  To be continued at some later hour, hopefully.

Duke left his shirt off as a sign of his displeasure, opening the door and making the bartender stand and watch as he wrote up payment for the crab delivery.  “Your tips go to the waitresses tonight,” Duke said, man to man, as he handed over the check.

“Ma-an,” he complained.  “I already drew the short straw in even coming back here.  No one else would do it.”

“It’s better to be lucky than smart.”  Duke had no sympathy to spare.

“And the Chief is out front.  He wants to talk to – her.” He nodded at Dana with a lifted chin.  “Told him she wasn’t here, but he’s still out there.  And –” he shrugged, “he’s drinking straight Coke.  Dry as a judge, as far as I can tell.”

“Fine,” Duke said, giving in to the inevitable. 

“You know there’s a bedroom just upstairs…”

“Get OUT!” he roared.  The bartender laughed and beat his retreat.

Dana handed him his shirt as he searched the room for something to beat into teeny tiny pieces.  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to embarrass you,” she said.

“What?  You didn’t.”  He waved at the long gone bartender.  “I’ve been meaning to fire his ass for months.”  Now he had an excuse.

“I did, you are, and I apologize.”

Duke considered her as she helped him with the buttons.  Took over from him with the buttons.  It was goddamn terrifying to have your heart live in someone else’s chest.  “I’m not embarrassed. I’m frustrated. What does Nathan want?”

She looked up as far as his collar, patted it as ship-shape, did not meet his eyes.  “We should probably go find out.”


	4. They Spun A Web For Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The truth hurts...

Nathan’s heart skipped a beat as Duke and… Dana… came out from some back room of the restaurant.  Neither of them looked glad to see him, but it took no detective skill at all for him to see that they were very pleased with themselves.  Very pleased with each other. 

He stuffed that thought down somewhere where he wouldn’t have to look at it.

 _She looked like Audrey_.

It hit him again, as it had this afternoon, as it had that night.  Hit him hard somewhere soft and he goddamn _felt_ that, if nothing else. 

Not even the black hair made any difference.

She was… whoever Audrey had been, confirmed by his hand on her skin, this afternoon.  Cool, soft, and that electric charge was just the same.  Not Audrey, not his Audrey, and still – his heart skipped and retreated and would have given up the fight entirely given a choice.  Nathan forced his eyes down.  He was not going to stare.

Duke took a seat beside him, putting Dana as far away from Nathan as the four person table allowed, Nathan noted.  She studied him openly as Duke called for a bottle.

Two years, when he’d been ready to wait the full twenty-seven – if she followed her usual pattern – and why couldn’t he be grateful for that?  He should be glad about it.  Instead all he felt was … pain.  The concept was almost abstract by now, a memory of pain, but he didn’t know what else to call it; the vertigo, the hole inside his chest that threatened to suck him in and down.

She was back and she was helping the Troubled.  Like she always did.  He’d stopped by McCutcheon’s before coming here, and he’d actually caught the man humming as he worked in his shop.  Not just worked in his shop, worked on Dana’s bike.  Cathy had made dinner, offered him some, the sullen teenager replaced with a sly woman-child – who was just really glad to not have to eat with plastic knives and forks anymore.  And she’d given his necklace to Dana, sorry.

“I believe you have something of mine?” he said.

Dana slipped her hand into her pocket, then dropped the necklace into his open palm, distant enough that they didn’t touch.

“What is that?” Duke asked.

“It was the Chief’s,” to Duke.  “The old Chief’s, my father,” to Dana.  He’d guessed that Cathy had a Trouble that was behind all the fights, but she wouldn’t talk to him.  But she’d opened up to … Dana… in the course of an afternoon.

Her brows came together, then she reached into her other pocket, and pulled out a ring.  Showed it to them.  “Explain.” Her word was sharp and short, an order.  Hurt and confused.

“Explain what?” Duke wondered, completely lost.  They’d managed to cut him out within the space of a few seconds. 

Dana grabbed at the necklace in Nathan’s hand, still there,  - he jumped, couldn’t help it – and lined up the faces of both together, showing it to Duke.  Not identical, but three blue diamonds in a row on both.  Showed it to him.  “Why do we have the same ring?”

“I don’t know.  I’ve never seen that one before.”

Duke looked between them, shifting from side to side.

“I don’t know where I got it,” Dana said, confessing her own confusion.  “I don’t remember.”

“Shh,” Duke said, laid his hand over hers, over top of the ring.  “Don’t worry about it.”

Her look was cold and she withdrew her hand.

Nathan took the opportunity to sit back himself.  He put the chain around his neck, tucked it under his shirt.  He didn’t like doing it in public, it felt a bit naked, but he did not trust himself  not to lose it out of his pocket, and he couldn’t actually check that it was still there just by feel.

“What about yours?” Dana asked, directly, ignoring Duke’s hint she should let it go.

Nathan shook his head.  “It’s not my mother’s, I know that. Not the one he wore while she was still alive.”  He hadn’t even known anything about it until after.  “I found it after he… died.”

Duke gave him an angry glance – he hadn’t known about it at all. But, what the hell, if it was a clue, Nathan hadn’t known it was a clue until this moment either. It wasn’t some secret he’d kept from him. It was his father’s and he’d worn it because… it was his father’s and it was a part of him he could keep.

It wasn’t like he was going to keep a chunk of his father’s petrified remains in his pocket or anything.

Dana sat back, flipped her hair back behind her ear – a gesture that stabbed him all over again.  In Audrey, that was a signal she was regrouping, frustrated at one approach to a problem or a mystery, she was about to come back with a  sudden 90degree turn and he had better keep up.

“McCutcheon says thank you, by the way.”  Nathan headed her off.  He did not want to get bogged down into a lengthy and probably pointless discussion about all that they did not know about the Troubles.  Today was more successful than they probably could have hoped, both father and daughter McCutcheon happier than when they got up in the morning, and Dana herself introduced to a fairly innocuous Trouble.  She had helped them, and she had gotten her feet wet.  But it was only the first of a number of much more troubling steps.

“To you, but not to me.”

Nathan nodded acknowledgement of this.  “He knew I would tell you.”

Dana just laughed to herself and shook her head.  “Maine.”

“And,” to Duke, “that you could bring the Tramp around again anytime.”

“Hey!” she called attention back to herself with a light slap on the table.  Spread her palms wide.  “Sitting right here.”

“I’m pretty sure he meant Duke’s backwards excuse for a truck.”  Nathan nearly grinned.  Almost.  It was a terrible joke, but he couldn’t help the lightness that bubbled to the surface. _She was back!_   It was like his facial muscles had forgotten how to make that coordinated expression, though, and the impulse faded away.  “You know it’s not going to last.  He’s a single father with a headstrong teenager in the house.  Their next argument –”

“I’ll go back.  It’s no troub-” hesitated over the unintended word, shrugged and gave up, “-ble.”  She smiled at him.

She had no trouble with her smiles.

“Stop it. Just -”  Duke pushed himself away from the table, violently and suddenly, nearly knocking into the people behind him.  Stalked away out onto the deck, taking the bottle with him.

Nathan waved Dana’s outrage down. “Let me,” when she would have followed him.  Which would probably only lead to some barnburner of a fight when Dana could not possibly understand half of what drove Duke.  “It’s me he’s mad at anyway.”

 

Nathan found Duke at the end of the little floating slip where boats visiting the Gull tied up, just down from the deck.  As an escape route it lacked imagination.  Duke paced the end of the dock, all six feet of it, like he was cornered.  Caged.

“And when are you going to get the Bronco fixed?” Duke attacked as soon as Nathan approached.

“It was icy,” Nathan repeated, a defense he’d told and retold and told himself.  The front passenger side of the Bronco was still a crumpled mess from when he’d slid into telephone pole last February.  It was an old argument and by now they could have it by rote, only hitting the highlights.

“You were drunk,” his friend spit at him.  “You were driving drunk and the only reason you weren’t charged is that none of your _minions_ dared.”

“Minions?”  Nathan deliberately suppressed a smile now.  “I have minions?”  He crossed his arms and waited.  But Duke seemed to have run out of venom, at least for now.

“You know where Audrey and I first met?”

“Beggars Hill.  You told me.”  He had, telling him the story on one those nights they had found themselves alone together, at the end of the bar at the end of a night, more often than he liked to remember, neither of them willing to face the emptiness that waited at home for them.  “She was faster on the draw.”  Leave it to Duke to find that the funniest part.

Nathan nodded.  He’d told the story many different ways, the way she pulled on him, the way she joked about pulling another gun, the way she joked even as her life – and her car – were balanced on the edge of oblivion.

“I go back there, about once a week,” Nathan said.  “Just park there and look over the edge.  I wouldn’t even feel it.  I just figured it was a waste of money, getting the Bronco fixed, until I stopped going back.”

Duke stared at him.  Music from the restaurant fell down around them, but soft and distant.  Rippled waves slapped at the boat hulls and the side of the dock.  Boat smell and sea smell, and Duke just stared at him.  “You are a cheap asshole, aren’t you?”

Nathan tilted his head.  That was probably true.

“Don’t you dare leave me alone with all this,” Duke said, sliding into real anger.  “Don’t you dare.”  Fear and anger.

Nathan did not point out that Duke was not alone.  Even without him, he was not alone anymore.

“You said it wasn’t – she wasn’t her,” Duke finally released.  “You said – and then you two sit there in front of me and it’s like – two years just _didn’t happen_.  You’re finishing each other’s sentences.  In seconds, Nathan.  You said it wasn’t her!”  Duke stabbed a finger at him like this accusation made some sort of sense, like it was an indictment of a crime committed against him.

The only reason he was still here was because of Duke.  Because as much as he thought he couldn’t face waiting the twenty-seven years for Audrey to return, he couldn’t honorably leave Duke to face the Troubles alone either.  After all the years they’d spent back and forth and back as friends and enemies and even – for a while – rivals for Audrey’s affections – they were somehow tied to each other – unwilling partners in a three-legged race sometimes, brothers in arms at others.

He wasn’t interested in taking Dana away from Duke.  If that was even possible.  “Audrey had blue eyes.  Dark, slate-blue.”

“So?”

“Dana’s are brown.”  There, he’d said it, her name.  Dana.  It wasn’t so hard.

“Meaning what?”

Duke was not that dense – but he was locked into resisting whatever threatened his relationship with Dana.  Already.  Barely forty-eight hours after they’d met.  Nathan shook his head.  “I don’t know what it means.  It’s her, and it’s not her.  She shouldn’t be back yet.  Last time – the Troubles went away when she did.”  No one knew if that was cause or effect, at least no one that Nathan had been able to talk to.  The Troubles had stayed this time.  “Last time, she was an FBI agent who thought a crime scene was better than ice cream.  We had the same sense of humor. This time she’s a bike-riding, cop-hating,-”

“Tramp,” Duke supplied, watching him carefully –

“ – who is aimed at you like a bullet.”

Duke could barely breathe, let alone talk.  Never mind think.  “No.” 

“She doesn’t know,” Nathan assured him.  “But someone _made_ her.  Copied her, just like all the others.  Picked out the real Dana Bellamy somehow and made her for you.”

He might as well have kicked Duke in the gut.  He doubled over, and had to sit on the gunwale of a boat, tied up behind him.  “You are _such_ a bastard, Wuornos.”  It wasn’t a denial.  It was worse, because Duke believed him.  That hurt on some new level because it was so easy for Duke to believe that this woman he’d fallen for – so hard and so fast – would inevitably betray him like all the others.

“I told you to be careful.”

“We were careful.  We went through a whole box of careful.”

Nathan crouched down beside his friend.  He wasn’t even finished yet and he had to get it out before he lost his nerve.  “She doesn’t know.  What she feels is real.  What she tells you she believes.  But you have to know, Duke.  You are who you are, and the things you can do – ”  So many things and not just his own Trouble.  Two years and they all carried the scars of war. Duke more than any of them.  “You know her history, and her history with your family.”

“She helps the Troubled,” Duke begged.  God knew he was one of them.

This time he did reach for the other man, grabbed and held him between shoulder and neck.  “I know.  Maybe it’s different this time.  And maybe this is the time we fix this goddamned thing for good.  I don’t know.”  He stood.  “I’m just saying, I’m not flirting with your girlfriend, whatever it looks like.”

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck you too.”  They were men, after all.  Satisfied at least that Duke was not about to  throw himself into the bay, Nathan left him.  There wasn’t much more damage he could do.  Someone else would have to pick up the pieces.


	5. Roll Me Away

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You only hurt the ones you love.

“It’s beautiful,” Dana gushed.  Gushed as much as burning lump in her throat allowed.  She blinked back tears.  Her bike, her worn out, abused and unloved, twenty year old  cheap-to-begin-with Suzuki – had been turned into a shiny classic road bike, chromed and even the plastic fairings and windshield were somehow restored to almost new.  “You didn’t have to do all this.”

“Yeah, well.” McCutcheon wouldn’t look at her.

Cathy stood there, beside her dad, looking like it was a gift for her, not Dana.  “We replaced the front bearings – they were nearly gone,” she said.  She reeled off the whole list of repairs and improvements made, while Dana stood and listened, patient with the teenager’s excitement.  She was grateful, she was.  She was astonished.  What she’d done was so easy… and this, this was too much.

“I don’t believe it,” when Cathy stopped for a breath.

“It’s Haven.  It’s magic.”  The girl bounced on her toes, until Dana realized what she wanted.  She opened up her arms, and Cathy threw herself.  They hugged, tight, and meaning it.

“Thank you,” Dana whispered.  “Thank you.  You don’t know what this means to me.”

“Yeah, well,” Cathy said, when they broke apart, cheeks flushing in embarrassment. 

Dana laughed.  Like father like daughter.  Peas in a pod.  It wasn’t magic, of course, and Dana knew exactly how much work it was.  My work here is done, she thought.  And then - how odd that thought was.

“Try it out.”  McCutcheon handed her her helmet.

Put the helmet on, started the bike with a touch and a wish, grinned wide at the music of a well-tuned engine.  Far better than her own amateur efforts had ever managed.  She’d kept it running, but this was how the pros did it.

He nodded at her to take it out, stepped back.

The renewed power caught her by surprise and she laid a little rubber, but soon had it back in hand.  Did it again turning out onto the main road as a demonstration to her gifted mechanic of his fine work.  Their fine work.  Maybe he’d test ridden it himself, but she doubted it.  She knew for certain Cathy was never going to be allowed to ride, but that was for them to work out.

Haven was a small town.  She rode up, just up, until she came to a lookout, King’s Point.  Pulled over there, pulled off her helmet.  It looked even smaller from here, spread out below.  Quaint, small, impossibly pretty.  She’d roamed over five continents and this was just one of hundreds, thousands, of pretty small towns she’d passed through, met a guy, and moved on.  Just one guy…

Stop it, she told herself.  Just go.  Put the bike in gear and go.

She had her bike.  The tank was full.  She could figure out the rest.

Just go.

He was just one guy and there would be another one along soon enough.  That thing that had clicked between them, the one that would hurt when it broke, was broke and it _hurt_.

Because whatever they had had, it was over now.  She didn’t know why or how, and somehow that _bloody_ cop was part of it, but something had changed between her and Duke and she didn’t know how to fix it.

Help me out here, she whispered to her voices.  They were so not talking right now, though.

She’d waited at the table for almost an hour until finally getting up and going to look for Duke.  He was gone, the bartender told her.  Almost an hour ago.  Gone back to his boat.  Right after the Chief left.

Left her there looking like a fool.

Worse was when she’d gone to his boat, walking the whole way because she didn’t have a bike, following the bartender’s astonished directions that she didn’t already know where it was.  She didn’t even know that Duke had a boat, let alone a hundred-something foot rust bucket of an ex-trawler.  As a freaking liveaboard. 

Worse was the kiss that had turned punishing and hard, and Duke had stumbled, falling hard as she pushed him away.  “Not dead yet,” he muttered clearly as she checked him for head injuries.  She left him there, on the floor in the stateroom, turned him over on his side.  The bottle was empty.  He deserved whatever came next.

Two days later and she didn’t know what came next.  She hadn’t seen him or heard from him and he wasn’t answering her calls.  But she had her bike and the whole rest of the world.  Haven was such a tiny little part of it and she could and would leave it behind.  Leave him behind.

She put the helmet back on.  Put the bike into gear and followed the signs out of town.

 

The road north was blocked by a massive forest fire.  All traffic rerouted south and around it.  Dana mentally shrugged.  She had no preference which way she went.

The road south was blocked by two tipped over semi-trailers, ran into each other head-on, both with live chickens that had broken loose during the accident.  The highway was covered in feathers like a snowstorm.  Why two trucks had been heading in exactly opposite directions with the same load, Dana didn’t know.  No traffic was getting through at all.  It was going to be hours to clean up the mess.

The road west was completely grid-locked, and Dana stared in astonishment at the TV reports of an actual freakish snowstorm on the road ahead, in July, when she finally stopped at a diner along the way.

“Go home,” the waitress told her, taking one look at her helmet and jacket, already breathless from the crowd who’d had the same idea for a break as Dana.  “You’ll never make it.”

 

Back in Haven, back in Audrey’s old apartment, back in Audrey’s claw-footed monstrosity of a tub, the water nearly scalding, Dana hugged her knees and tried to shake off the squirming snaky feeling that something really _really_ weird had just happened.

It was coincidence.

Why the fuck couldn’t she get warm again, then?

She did not discount the stupidity of truck drivers anywhere, but how could there be a snowstorm and a forest fire on the same day, within fifty miles of each other?

When the forces of the universe aligned to tell her to stay in Haven, surely it was some ridiculous level of arrogance to want to tell them all to go to hell.

It was also a sign of incipient insanity to think that it was all directed at her.

Either she was losing her mind, or the universe was out to get her.  Those were her choices.

A knock at her door made her jump.  A knock that rattled glass in frame, door on hinges and resonated a wave in the tub. “DANA!”

She answered it wearing only a towel, still dripping.  Duke looked her up and down, a disturbing, nasty expression in his eyes that made her feel sick all over again.  “Can I join you?” he asked.  Intimated. Snarled. Same difference.  Like he would regardless of her answer.

She let him in.  Let him pull the towel off.  Stood by while he pulled his own clothes off, filthy and stinking, then carried her back to the bath.  Let him go in first, cringing at the heat, and then crawled in with him, on top of him.

He just held her at first, and she him.  They said nothing.  Then he started to stroke her face, her back, and she started to cry.  He made love to her until she stopped crying, started demanding, started slopping water over the rim with their movements.

He carried her to the bed.

She bit at him.  Hit at him with her closed fists.  He’d left her, abandoned her.  Embarrassed her. She raked her face away from him when he tried to kiss her.  He’d tried to kiss her stupid drunk and it disgusted her.  He pinned her hands to the sheets with one fist, lifted her leg around his waist and penetrated her with one easy stroke.  She cried out and writhed away from him – two days and he’d avoided her and it _wasn’t. that. easy_.  He pinned her and held her, ignored her whimpers as he ground her beneath him, harsh groans in his throat, until he came with shocking force, thrusting painfully into her and throwing her over the edge with him.

 

“Where were you?” Duke asked.

 _Where was she?_   She looked at him, astonished.  Of all the colossal nerve.  Two days without a word and he could question her?  “I went for a ride.  Where were you?”

“Out hunting with Nathan.”

 

The cabin faced the lake, presenting Nathan with only the back end of a truck and camper, and a tiny window that was probably a bathroom, in the middle of a blank wall, as he drove up.

Around front, Nathan walked the narrow path the threaded there, it was much more comfortable – a wide deck doubled the size of the small building, a small lawn where the weeds were winning, a floating dock where a canoe waited with a  single paddle.

Vince Teagues sat behind a typewriter, on the deck, staring out at nothing.  Nathan cleared his throat.

Vince struggled painfully to his feet.  “Chief Wuornos.  To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Nathan took that as about as close to an invitation he was going to get, and stepped up on the deck.  It was easier than watching the old man try to come down to him.  Vince had aged terribly in the year since he’d last seen him.

It wasn’t a pleasure for either of them, talking now, and Nathan saw no need to pretend otherwise.  But even so, he was moved to pity.  They had gone to war, and while neither of them had won, perhaps Vince had lost more.  And – like many wars – it had solved nothing.  Nathan needed him now.

“She’s back.”

“Ah,” Vince said, not pretending to not understand, and leaned up against the railing.  “That’s… interesting.”

“Why?  Why is it interesting?”

“She’s early.”

“I know that!”  Nathan bit down on his shout.  He was not here to argue.  He needed information.  “Why is she back early?  Why is she back at all?”

Vince looked out over the lake.  “If I knew that…”  He shook his head.  “I _would_ tell you.  I’m not your enemy, Nathan.”

Well, they sure as hell weren’t friends. Not since he’d found out about Vince’s attempt to bring his father back from the dead. All the way back, not just his ghost. Not since four people had died in that attempt.

“You and Sarah…?”

“That,” and the big man seemed to somehow shrink, grow even older.  “That was a long time ago.”

“But you knew her?”

“I asked her to marry me.”  _Huh_.  Nathan shifted his weight, foot to foot, crossed and uncrossed his arms.  He hadn’t known that.  “But, like I said, that was a long time ago.”

“Lucy and the Chief?”  That wasn’t actually the information he’d come here to get, but … it had been on his mind.

Vince actually smiled, affectionately, at the memories evoked. “She was a firecracker, that one. They were always, always at each other. About everything. Hurricane Lucy. She’d storm into the station and everyone would duck-” He stopped himself, saw Nathan again, and the twenty-first century. “Not like you and me, if that’s what you’re asking. She was reporter, he was a beat cop. They ran into each other. I don’t think it was personal.”

Vince was wrong, Nathan thought. His father would have loved a woman who could match him beat for beat, argue and yell and stand up to him. Someone who challenged him, thrilled and surprised him. Someone the polar opposite of his sweet, pliant, helpful mother. Maybe Vince didn’t know about his father’s ring. They may or may not have gotten around to being lovers, but it was definitely personal.

Lucy had been a reporter.  Vince and Dave ran the only newspaper in town.  Vince must have worked with Sarah’s reincarnation on a daily basis… the same way the Chief had worked with, at least supervised, Audrey.  Seeing _not-her_ every day and somehow being okay with that.  Maybe the twenty-five years made it different somehow.  Made the scar tissue thicker.  

“Why did you push me at her?”  That was out of his mouth too soon, too.  Plaintive.

“You needed to be pushed.  You weren’t going anywhere on your own.” 

Nathan clamped down on the rage that threatened to erupt from him.  How dare he manipulate – everyone – like they were toys he could play with – for what, just to sit back and watch them cry and scratch at each other, fall in love and suffer and die?  For his amusement?

“What about the Crockers?  All the different generations?”

Vince nodded.  “Now you’re getting closer.”

“Meaning what?”

“They are somehow at the center of all this.  Of the Troubles themselves.”  Nathan stuck his hands in his back pockets and waited.  Vince had a terrible habit of doling out only what was asked. If you didn’t know the answer already you almost never asked the right question.  Nathan was fed up with his games.  Either he would tell him or not, but Nathan was not going to be trapped with words.  "Do you remember Ian Haskell?" Vince asked.

"Yes." Blunt and flat. He wasn't likely to forget. He'd absorbed Nathan's Trouble - and even though he'd been threatening Audrey and Duke with a gun, even though he'd murdered innocents and was intent on more - killing him had clung like tar. Slow and sticky and poisonous. He'd only finally shed that with the birth of Natalie, his goddaughter.

 “The Crocker curse is evil and subtle.  Think about it.  Killing someone to save them?  The real curse is what it does to the man himself.  Even if he starts out with good intentions, just the fact of killing someone – it eats away at even the best of men.”  He turned a steely eye on Nathan.  The body was wracked with arthritis, a legacy of long ago abuse.  The mind was obsidian, sharp and dark.  “And the Crockers were never that.”

“Duke is.”

Vince snorted.  “Listen to you.  You’ve changed your tune.”

“Duke has absorbed more curses –” than he’d killed.  “He doesn’t have to kill.”  But he had killed.  And this time he’d walked away and left Nathan to clean up the mess.

“How many more before it drives him insane?”  Vince stung like a wasp.  “How many more before it is just easier to kill than to carry all that weight himself?  It always goes like this, Nathan.  Simon wasn’t evil, not at first.  He wanted to help.  The same with his father.  The same with _his_ father.  It’s called a curse for a reason.  Using it to help, _using it at all_ only makes it worse.”  He sat back down behind the typewriter.  Nathan noticed that the page was entirely blank.  “You can’t change that.  Duke can’t change that.”

“How many men have you killed?”

“Far too many,” Vince answered, almost casually. “I will tell you this.  When this new one –”

“Dana.”

He nodded.  “When she kills Duke, the Troubles will end.  I don’t know the whys or hows, but the pattern is consistent.”

It didn’t actually surprise him.  He hadn’t known, but he wasn’t surprised.  “Then Haven is in trouble.  Because they’re already in love.  With each other.”

Vince shrugged vaguely.  “Love and hate are not as distant or different as you might imagine.”

 


	6. Hope and Ruin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If this was hunting with Nathan…

Dana turned over to face Duke, putting an end to the way he was lazily stroking her back.  “Stop, please.”

“Why?”  His voice made her toes curl, promising mischief and adventure, laughing like this was some unlooked for new opportunity to tease her. 

Her monkey king.  Her _happy_ monkey king, and it had taken nearly two weeks to drive the black haunted anger from him.  Nathan Wuornos’ work, she was sure.  Out hunting with Nathan, her skinny white ass.  Hunting something that shot back, because in among the pile of reeking clothes she’d thrown in the laundry the next morning, aching from the way he’d used her that night, was a bullet-proof vest.

Duke was not a cop, and had no business in whatever hunting the Haven PD were doing. Particularly if it was going to rip his heart out the way it had.

“Not on the back.”

“Why?”

“You know why.”  He’d been extraordinarily respectful of what was there – and never once hesitated or questioned, and they never mentioned it.  She didn’t ask about his scars, he didn’t ask about hers.  But there was not asking, and then there was… fetishizing. She did not like her back touched.

He went up on one elbow. “Dana, I don’t. Tell me.” His voice was still melted toffee, but the laughter was gone. If she was serious, he would be too.

“I want a job.”

He laughed and fell back.  “If you insist.  Go get a job.”  He turned to look at her.  “You don’t have to, you know.”

“Duke!”  She punched him lightly on his shoulder.  “I’m asking you for a job.  I’m actually a pretty good waitress.”

“At my restaurant, where I already have a full staff.  What’s the difference?”

That hurt, because it was true.  She’d taken everything he’d given her, including clothes and more than enough cash for anything she wanted.  A featherweight chain of gold with a penny sized pendant of the Chinese ‘double happiness’ icon; something she had woken up with, already around her neck.  A message, even if he couldn't say it out loud. “You’re right.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said.

“Don’t worry.  I’ll ask down at Johnny’s.”  Johnny’s Bar and Grill out on West City Ave.  Dark, dank and loud.  “I’ll bet the tips are better there anyway.”  For the strippers, anyway.

He knew she was teasing, but she regretted it when he got up out of bed and headed for the head.

She lay back down.  She liked the boat – lots more space, ironically, than the apartment, and fewer reminders of the former owner.  Better mattress.  She did miss the tub.  But sometimes it felt like Duke was a hermit crab and this was his shell.  She was welcome to join him, but it was his.  Sometimes, like now, it even felt like Duke was hiding her, keeping her away from everyone else.

Her thwarted escape had scared her badly.  Duke’s crisis had provided a convenient excuse to put it aside, and stay.  But that was what it felt like, now, a trap and an excuse.  Something was still changed between them, the necklace notwithstanding.  Different and wrong.  His guard was up – all the time.

 

Out on deck with coffee and newspapers, Dana fingered the necklace, watching Duke.  “You read Chinese?”

He gave her a one-sided grin as he turned the page.  “Slowly.”

“But you read Chinese…”  She was willing to follow his trail of breadcrumbs, but first he had to put some down for her.  “How?”

“Macau, 1999 to  2004.”

“Tell me,” she asked with a smile, mug to her lips and knees curled under.  She liked bedtime stories.  She liked bedtime stories over a lingering brunch best of all.

He put the newspaper away.  “You first.”

Oh.  No fair.

Of course, it was perfectly fair.  You jump into bed with a guy who is exciting and mysterious and then, morning after or weeks later, had to go about the finding out about each other anyway.  Most guys were perfectly willing to talk about themselves to the exclusion of probing too deeply about her.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Duke said.

Duke’s phone buzzed. He looked at it briefly, at her, then answered. She didn’t listen. Duke’s side of the conversation was just a ‘yes-no-yes-fine’ kind of thing, but she knew. Nathan. Duke started spooling up like a jet engine every time he called.

She got up and walked back inside the cabin.  Brunch was over, obviously.  If she ever got the chance, she was going to _murder_ Nathan Wuornos.

She’d only just talked Duke down from the last time they’d gone out ‘hunting’.

Duke came in, started getting dressed, including putting on his bullet-proof vest.  She turned around, the better to not see him with.  But she peeked when she heard metal on metal, and the snick of a sharp blade being released and put back.  He was loading himself up with knives, a Taser and other exotic weapons, in various scabbards and holsters, tucking them up his sleeves, down his pants, around his ankle.  He reached over her head and pulled down a sword that she would have sworn was just decoration.

“Wouldn’t a gun just be easier?” she asked, when he sat back down on the bed beside her.

“I can’t use guns.  The bullets turn around and hit me.”

She stared at him.  He was perfectly, deadly, serious.  “You have a Trouble.”

“More than one.”

Well, wasn’t this the day for personal revelations.  Just not hers.

“Do you want to come?” Duke asked.  Mournfully. Dreading something that couldn’t be avoided.

With him?  Out hunting?  “Does Nathan want me there?”

“I didn’t ask him.”

So he wouldn’t know.  In which case, “Yes.”

 

Nathan put away his real reaction, watching Dana stride alongside Duke as they approached.  Settled on annoyed and distracted.  “Why did you bring her?”

“Just to piss you off, Wuornos,” she snapped.

Duke sighed, like he was the adult of the family.  “We need her, and you know it.  What do we have?”

 _He_ had two dead, and a scene out of a nightmare.  “Not this one, Duke.”

“Are you going to hold your breath for a good one?  Why did you even call me?”

He was right.  Nathan shook his head, just to clear it.  He was right and he shouldn’t have called.  At the same time, who else could he have called?  He looked around at the ambulance, the half dozen cruisers and all his uniformed men out doing their jobs; securing the scene, canvassing the neighbors, rolling out tape.  The coroner’s van pulled up at that moment and he noted how Dana’s eyes widened just a little, seeing it.

His mistake was not just in calling on Duke whenever the Trouble was dire – though he was beginning to see that was a serious one – it was that he hadn’t even thought about finding some way to replace Audrey on his staff.  Someone to help, trained and authorized, and at least minimally competent to conduct an investigation. 

His head had been so far up his ass over losing her, he didn’t know how he even still had a job.  No one was going to replace her ability to connect with the Troubled, but sometimes he just needed another cop.

“Come on, I’ll show you.”

 

Stan was a nice man, Dana could tell.  Such a nice man and having such a bad day.

Covered in blood, seated in the back of the ambulance, sucking down oxygen and visibly trembling – he took one look at her and –  “Oh, thank god.  Audrey.  You’re here.  Thank God.”  He looked at Nathan, at her, and his panic dialed down by notches and heartbeats per second.

Duke squeezed her elbow, hard, when she started to respond.

“Tell them,” Nathan ordered.

Stan should have been a bank clerk or something, she thought. Never a cop. He took a deep breath, “There’s an orc in the house.”

Nathan rolled his eyes, hid it with shuffled feet and a displacing swipe at his eyebrows.  “Neighbors reported a disturbance.  Stan took the call, found the –”

“Orc.” Duke grinned, delighted.

Dana elbowed him in the gut.  This was not fun or funny.  Duke didn’t seem to realize that Stan’s blood soaked uniform was not from his own blood.  Not that that would have been, either.

“Found the husband and wife in bed, slashed –” glance at her, “stem to stern.  Then he found the orc.”

“By orc, you mean…?”  She directed the question at Stan.

“Mean, ugly, teeth, hair.”  His hands waved around, indicating something really large, or at least really frightening.  “An orc.  A real orc.”  His shock was coming back.  Orcs were impossible.  There was no such thing as ‘real’ orcs.  The more he thought about it, the more it scared him.

“And you got away from it.”

“Yeah, orcs are easy.  In the game – one orc is nothing.”  In the game.  This was not in the game. His mind jumped somewhere, anywhere, away from that.  Stan stared at her.  “Where did you _go_?”

Nathan hauled her away by the elbow, dragging her to the front of the ambulance.  “Okay, that’s enough.  I need him back in one piece.”

He didn’t seem actually angry though.  “I wasn’t –” 

“Don’t traumatize my officer a second time.  Some people can’t accept –” He cut himself off.  “Dana, I’m sorry.  This is not the time or the place to explain all this to you.”  He spared a glare at Duke.  Duke – who – who was… What the fuck was going on with Duke?

His grin was feral and his eyes narrowed to slits.  He compulsively checked and rechecked everywhere he had stowed his weapons, just a touch on every one. He locked with their gazes and tensed like at the starting gate.  “Can we go now?”

“Stay. Here.” Nathan told her.

Dana watched as the two men ran for the door of the house, a pleasant bungalow with attached garage, SUV in the driveway.  Stan came to stand beside her, still wearing the thick grey blanket from the ambulance – the kind they gave to patients in shock.  “I’m really glad you’re back,” he said.

“Thanks.”  Irony.  It tasted of vanilla.  “I’m not sure I am.”

He watched the house with her.  Sighed understanding.  “Yeah.”

 

Dana stared at the bodies in the bed, blood-splattered like… blood, thrown against the wall, the curtains, the carpets.  Arterial gushes, impact spatters, long streaks of a blade throwing off the liquid of a previous cut as it arced down for the next one.  

The orc had gone down with barely twenty damage points, Duke had said, laughing as he twirled her in his arms.  Out on the lawn once the house was clear.  It hadn’t even touched him.  One thrown dagger and – miming – a vicious two-handed swing from knee to throat.  Then it had blinked out of existence. 

She pushed him away, tried to look him in the eyes. She knew he wasn’t on drugs – but, Christ, he was high on something. He wanted to go home and celebrate, she pushed his hands away and went into the house. Not now, and not at all when he was this creepy. If this was hunting with Nathan…

The man’s body lay halfway onto the floor.  He wore pajamas with piped edges, tailored collar and tiny decals… no, crests, of some design or another in repeated pattern in the fabric.  The wife’s body was where she’d slept, only her head faced the ceiling, chin unnaturally high as her throat, neck and spine together had been cut cleanly through until only a bare stretch of skin held it to the rest of her body.  Frilly nightgown lace, though she couldn’t tell what the color had been before all the blood –

“What are you doing here?!”  Nathan stepped in front of her, close, blocking her view.  “I told you –”  He pulled her out of the way while the coroner’s people came in, back out into the hall, crowded up together to get out of their way.

She just stared up at him.  She could see his pulse beat along a cord in his neck.  An extra twenty pounds would bring him up to skinny.  Everything extraneous was burnt away, nothing left but will and tendon.  It couldn’t last.

“Let me help,” she said.

“Dana,” he sighed, and she caught the tail end of that wish.  She was not Audrey.  Audrey was the cop, Audrey was the one people waved at as she moved around town,  Audrey was the one customers at the Gull still whispered and looked over their shoulders for whenever she went down there.  She was not Audrey, but she wasn’t useless – and he needed help.

“Two tours in Afghanistan as a combat medic, Nathan.  I don’t need your protection.”

Oh sure, telling Duke was like pulling her own teeth.  Telling Nathan and her mouth was like an unzipped fly.

His eyes lit, stared, but – interesting – he did not disbelieve her.  “Why do you-?” He cut off his rather impolite question.  “Take Duke home.  That will help.  This is just … cleaning, now.”

It probably would.  Duke still roamed the house practicing his Warcraft skills, leaping out of doorways with drawn knife or blade. Yelling his fool head off.  “What _is_ that?”  Why was he so suddenly crazy?

“I think it’s his Trouble, all of them. It’s all mixed up in him.” He shook his head. 

“I know, you’ll explain later.”  Out in the front yard had not been the time.  In the restaurant with two matching rings had not been the time.  He’d, _They had_ , had weeks to explain it to her.  “Guess what, Nathan.  It’s later.”

Duke sailed up, waving two gaudily covered books at them.  “Look what I found.”  World of Warcraft books.

Nathan shrugged at her.  Duke was now their hyperactive ten year old.  “I will, I promise.”  To Duke:  “Where did you get those?”

“Basement.  Room’s full of them.”

“This is a crime scene, Duke.  You’re disturbing evidence.”

“What exactly are you going to charge an orc – a dead, vanished orc – with, Nathan?  An orc’s gonna do what an orc’s gonna do,” grinned at Dana.

“Wait – someone did this, right?  That’s how these things work?  Someone with a Trouble did this?”  Brought it here; manifested it somehow?

Duke put his arm around her, proudly, looking at Nathan.  “See, we talk.  It’s not just ‘sex, sex, sex.’”

Obviously a quote from some private conversation between them.  Dana kept a leash on her temper.  Duke was obviously not in his right mind, and Nathan – Nathan looked like he was actually about to laugh.  His ears were scarlet.  Nathan’s face was transformed with that hint of a smile.  Dana was reminded that those brackets on the sides of his mouth weren’t the scars of old injuries.  They were laugh lines.

Her own face was probably bright pink.  

“Yeah, so?”  Nathan said.  Ignoring Duke.

“Well it wasn’t Mister Piped Pajamas in there.  He’s never played a video game in his life.” 

Nathan turned to Duke, the humor draining away.  “Show us where you found those.”

 

The basement bedroom was a video gamer’s wet dream – and that image in his mind nearly made Nathan gag.  Three extremely large computer screens, various controllers, a special chair that he didn’t even want to think about… books, posters.  Bedding.  Most of it now torn to shreds, hacked to pieces and/or beaten to ruin.

Seventeen year old Shawn Wright – son of Mr. Piped Pajamas upstairs, Jake Wright – was nowhere to be found.  Victim or perp, there was no way to tell yet.  Or, given the way Troubles usually went – probably both at the same time.

Dana led Stan down the stairs, into the room.  They needed his experience, his expertise, and she said that it would help with his critical incident trauma to give him some control over the situation again.  Nathan wasn’t sure about that; Stan still looked like he was going to pass out at any moment.  He clung to Dana’s arm, and she directed him with one hand on his back.

Stan was really good with the lost dog calls, acceptable at traffic stops.  He’d even handled a couple domestics without anyone getting shot or knifed.  But there was no way he had any expertise at a bloody double homicide and a Troubled one at that.  But apparently he did have some expertise at computers – who knew – and this game.  He dismissed the computer and screens as useless, but found an undamaged laptop amid the mess, managed to bring up a video game that Nathan didn’t recognize.

He did recognize one of the characters though.  The orc – or the several orcs that were there onscreen – exactly like one he and Duke had taken down earlier.

“That’s him,” Duke confirmed.  “That’s the fucker.”

He was coming down, Nathan noted.  The battle high was fading into bitter anger.  He didn’t miss how Dana squeezed Duke’s shoulder, petted his hair – but her attention remained squarely on Stan and the screen.

The orcs on screen turned to look at … them.  For all the world like they could see into the bedroom itself. 

“Shut it down,” Nathan ordered.  “If one got through, more can.”

“Wait –” Stan said. Nathan’s eyebrow rose. Stan said that. Back to him. Stan never said anything back to him but, ‘yes, chief.’ Anyway, it looked like looking was all that the creatures could do; they ran up to the edge of the screen and stopped. By some invisible force – the edge of the screen on their side? “They can’t get through.” Thank you Mr. Obvious.

“Because Shawn isn’t here?” Dana asked, him and Duke both.

Likely, Nathan nodded.

“Where is he?” Duke asked darkly.

“No.” God help him.  They weren’t going to hunt down a kid.  “You’re going home.”  Duke was not going to hunt down a kid.  Not this time so soon after the last time.  He did have actual police officers to help him – and finding a teenager was not beyond their ability.  Shawn could be injured, on the run from more of the orcs…  He called Laverne and got her to relay the new info – start a search for Shawn Wright.

“Armed and dangerous,” Stan inserted.

“What?”

“He’s armed and dangerous,” he repeated.  Dana encouraged him with a nod.  “He was in the game –”  Stan pointed at something on the screen that was meaningless to Nathan.  “He was in character, in the game – he came out in character.”

“What was his character?”

Stan shook his head to Duke’s question.  “No idea. That’s what I mean. It’s completely gone.  He’s out here now.”

“So the orc followed him?”  Nathan asked.

“His whole crew followed him.”

“Shut it off,” Nathan ordered, meaning it this time.  If there was connection between game world and this world, maybe…  Faint hope.  It was _never_ that simple.


	7. The Weight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wonder is allowed. Hope is possible.

Nathan drove.  Randall Paperny was Shawn Wright’s best friend, and neither of them had shown up for school this morning.  They were on their way to Paperny’s house to see where he might have gone, whether they had gamed together – whether they had emerged from their game world together.  They couldn’t even tell yet which of the boys had the Trouble.

Dana sat in the back of the Bronco with Duke.  He’d refused to give her the keys to the Tramp, and she’d refused to drive with him while he was still fucked up from whatever battle high rode him.  He twitched and blinked, couldn’t sit still – she should have taken him home like Nathan suggested.  He was winding himself up again with the renewed chase.

She wanted to scream and beat on him.  Stop it.  Stop, stop, stop.  He was supposed to be her happy refuge, her safety and laughing strength.  Invulnerable and invincible.  Not another one of the broken, bleeding boys she had to keep together with her bare hands.

“Give me some of those,” she demanded.  Meaning some of his weapons. 

If she was going back to war, she wasn’t going in unarmed.

Duke’s grin was pleased – another thing they could share.  She shook her head at his offer of the sword – there was no way she could swing that at another person.  But she took a couple knives, and the Taser.  She really wanted her  M-16, but that was not going to happen.

One minority report of a voice inside her wailed terror and helplessness.  Not even her inner child; her inner damsel in distress, her inner frozen useless hysterical victim of a princess.  She ignored it.  The rest of them… some wanted it over with.  Some wanted damage done to avenge those two nice people in the bed.  Some even wanted to show off in front of the boys and show them what she could do.  Mostly, she wanted… she, herself… wanted to know what was going on and to stop it.  Stop hurting each other.

She couldn’t not help.

No matter how loud that hysterical princess got.

Dana met Nathan’s eyes in the rearview mirror as she buckled on the Taser holster.  Flicked away.  Nathan was not her concern right now.

She put her hand over Duke’s, preventing another go-round of him practicing with a quick-draw knife, triggering the hidden mechanism over and over again.

“He’s a kid,” she said, pleading.  He was a messed up kid with a sudden superpower he couldn’t control.  The scene in the bedroom was horrific, but maybe…  “They’re both kids.”  There had to be another way besides killing them.

There had to be a way besides Duke killing him.

“You weren’t here,” he responded darkly.  Unintelligibly.

“I know.  I’m here now.”

Something flickered in his eyes, recognition.  “Audrey?”

Dana could have wailed herself.  “No, my love.”  Sifted hair from eyes as if to clear his vision.  Held on.  “It’s Dana.  I’m Dana.  I’m here.”

“We’re here,” Nathan announced, pulling into a driveway.

The Paperny home was lower rent than the Wright’s, a clapboard bungalow from the 1950’s in need of a paint job – not old enough to be heritage, not new enough to be comfortable.  It was also nearly destroyed.  The front door lay on the lawn, intact, along with the shattered remains of the wall that had once held it, all in splinters and dust.  The doorway was a gaping wound in the house, revealing the guts of the front room torn apart like a bomb had gone off.

Or a Horde had invaded.

Duke took point, sword out. He and Nathan alternated, moving through the house – Nathan announced them as Haven Police, standard warnings, but there was no one to hear them.  No cars in the driveway, middle of the day – maybe no one was home.

But there’d been a fight in the house – an axe wielding, flame throwing, furniture tossing battle.  Between who and who, they couldn’t tell.  One victim – human and dead, as Dana checked his pulse. _Pro forma_ only, he had a hole in his chest you could see through, same diameter as a coffee mug.  She didn’t recognize the costume he wore, layers of unwieldy looking armor, and, pulling it off, a helmet designed more for looks than function.

She looked up at Nathan, who shook his head.  Not Shawn Wright or Randall Paperny.  Just some random player who…

“Keep moving,” Duke barked.  “Nothing we can do for him.”

Nathan picked her up, hand under one arm, got her to her feet.  Duke was moving out with or without them. They had to stay together.  She knew the fucking drill.  She shoved the police chief away.  One more dead boy, what did it matter, after all.  All part of the drill.

They found the room they were looking for – much the same as Shawn’s, an elaborate video game setup, destroyed.  Only Randall Paperny was still in it, laying on the floor, curled up on his side.  No game costume.  The carpet squelched underfoot as she ran to him, oozing up blood where she knelt to check him out.  No way to tell how much, the way the carpet had absorbed it, but … a lot.

“Where’s Shawn,” Nathan demanded, kneeling beside her.

“Gone,” Randall whispered.

“Don’t talk.” Conscious, breathing, oriented.  Good.  Blood pressure too low to register in extremities – checking his pulse at his wrist – bad.  Pulse at his neck very weak and slow.

“Ambulance is on the way,” Nathan told her.

She nodded.  She found the leak pretty quickly, a deep gash to his upper abdomen – Randall held it with his hands, she put her hands over his, applied pressure.  There was nothing else she could do.  She didn’t even have gloves. Never mind the clamps, surgery, liters and liters of blood this boy needed.

“He’s gone,” the boy repeated.  Little boys, all of them, playing at games they could not possibly understand, throwing their lives away, just for – for what?

“Don’t talk,” she told him again.  Respiration increased blood flow. Blood flow, now, only increased blood loss.

“Where?  Where did he go?” Nathan questioned.

“Nathan!”

Nathan clamped his hand over hers, squeezing painfully tight.  Repeated his question.

“School,” Randall sighed. “He wants to kill – everyone.  I said no.”  As if waiting for that sanction, he let go, of the breath in his lungs, and the hold he’d kept on his own life.

No pulse at all.  “Fuck!”  Dana rolled him over on his back, ripped open his shirt, started chest compressions.  “Hold him there,” she ordered Nathan, “apply pressure to the wound.”  Nathan did as he was told, but he looked at her.

Oh, Christ, she knew that look.  That look that said she was wasting her time.  It was already too late.  Fuck them.  They didn’t know.  Death was not an on/off switch.  Unless you hit just the right centers of the brain, it took minutes – minutes of screaming agony sometimes. Shattered bodies and broken minds – the moment of IED detonation lost forever because the brain simply didn’t function – but the minutes afterward stretched out on endless repeat. Burning and trapped and screaming…

Dana hesitated, came back. Checked for a pulse again, nothing. Two breaths, started compressions again. Wiped the snot that streamed from her nose on her shoulders without missing a beat. Fucking autonomic reaction. Meant nothing. She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t anywhere near crying.

Where the fuck was the ambulance?  “Where the fuck-”  The paramedics appeared like she’d conjured them – all pressed uniforms and bright red emergency bags.  No gloves.  Fucking _amateurs._ What kind of call did they think they were responding to, like they had time to glove up while they were standing around waiting?  She gave them the rundown –

Even as Duke pushed himself off the wall and went to Nathan, “We should go.”

Dana wiped Randall Paperny’s blood off onto her jeans.  The paramedics took over the body – body, not patient – Dana figured they needed the practice as they started compressions and oxygen.  Looked at Nathan. “We should go.” 

Shawn Wright had emerged from the game in character – along with who knew how many of his buddies – and then murdered his parents in their bed and hunted down his friend at home for refusing to go along with a planned massacre at his school.  She had it wrong from the start.  Not a frightened confused kid at all.  A budding psychopath turned into a video game character now headed for his high school.  Klebold and Harris only wished they’d had that kind of power.

“We should go, Nathan.”

 

The exterior of the school looked entirely normal. Normal except for the students running for their lives and the police cars rolling up into the parking lot.

Even Laverne’s voice over the radio had turned clipped and short – her version of panic – as she relayed calls from all over.  Shawn’s posse had walked the ten minutes from Paperny’s house to the school, scaring people into car accidents – but they were focused on their goal.  Reports from inside the school from students and teachers indicated at least six – no way to tell who was a person or who was like the orc, a character from the game itself.

Not that it mattered at this point.

He should really look into forming a SWAT team for the Haven PD, Nathan thought.  It would blow his budget to fragments, but, right now, he might just be able to get it through.

Dana and Duke argued with each other over who should go in – a background noise Nathan tuned out as unnecessary.  Dana wanted Duke to stay behind because then they could go in with guns.  Duke wanted Dana to stay behind because… he wanted to protect her.  He was in love with her and wanted her to be safe.  Nathan sympathized, with both of them, but he couldn’t spare either of them.

Standard procedure was to protect first responders – cops, firefighters, paramedics – even above civilian deaths.  First responders only became more victims and made the situation worse when they rushed in with no regard for their own safety.  Good in theory.  In practice, there was always a risk associated with responding to a situation that had already injured or killed someone else.  Time was _always_ an enemy.

They were here, and he needed them both.  There was no one else he trusted.  As far as hostage negotiators went – Dana was Audrey.  He hoped.  There was no one else.  He couldn’t afford to risk either of them.  He couldn’t afford not to.

 

The interior of the school was anything but normal.  The walls had been turned into rock cliffs and castle walls, the floors were ground – sometimes grassy, sometimes rocky.  Dana walked hip deep through an apparent lake she could not see while he and Duke were stymied behind her – until she literally led them by the hand.  Nathan could see the depth fall away beneath his feet, and he couldn’t actually feel any different – he stumbled and nearly fell.  Duke steadied him.  Nathan closed his eyes, gritted teeth and deliberately turned over control and trust to the other two.

It happened suddenly, unexpectedly – as it always did.  Nathan was on point, Dana right behind him in the school hallway.  They were crouched down and checking out the next classroom, while Duke was behind them, waving a full class of students down the opposite way – the way they’d come in and cleared for their escape.

Nathan turned around to see an orc blink into existence behind Duke’s turned back – between him and Nathan.

Duke turned, arms spread wide as if to shield the students that way.

The orc split him from shoulder to breastbone with one massive swing of his axe.

 

Dana screamed, “Duke!” and attacked, just as Duke stuck the orc like an olive in a martini with his sword.  It flickered out, both sword and Duke collapsed to the floor. 

No no nonononooooo…

Dana slid the last several yards on her knees, gathering Duke up in her arms.  She pressed him together, ignoring the uselessness of the action.  A helicopter evac, a surgical team standing by – she could – she could –  She could carry him out herself.  The other paramedics and cops were not allowed in until the school was secure – she would carry him herself.

There were the screaming ones, those stupid brave bleeding soldiers – her boys, all of her boys – those with breath and sense enough to scream, and then there were the ones like Duke.  Silent, and calm.  The keening came from her, and even after she realized it was her, she couldn’t make it stop.

Liquid brown eyes looked up at her.  “Hey, you,” he breathed.

“Duke.”  There was nothing else to say.  Nothing else she could say.  She was crying, now.

His focus shifted to over her shoulder.  Nathan, crouched there, still on the lookout down the hall, but shifting glances down to look at Duke.  “You think?” Duke wondered at him. 

“I guess we’ll find out,” Nathan said calmly.  Worried, but calm.  Fucking iceman.

Duke looked up at her, eyes wide and staring at the pain.  She held her face to his.  “I heard you.”  Huffed, no voice. His lips against her ear.  “In the truck, I heard you.”  His eyes closed, and he sagged limp and unconscious in her arms.

Not unconscious.  No pulse.

Nathan did not move – she could feel him behind her as she rocked Duke in her arms, as she sobbed, gulping for air, and then started all over again.

“Dana,” Nathan started, when she seemed to be running down.

She knew.  She knew the drill. There was an imminent threat somewhere in this school and more innocent lives in danger, and they couldn’t just sit here in the middle of the hallway, exposed – She knew the fucking drill.  Give her a fucking minute here, Christ.

“Dana – Duke can absorb other people’s Troubles.”

Could.  He could.  Used to.

“There was this doctor… Haven had a lot of zombies for a while.”

Dana finally looked at Nathan.  Was he completely insane?  Even if that were true – what the fuck did it matter now?

“Until Duke cut him, and absorbed his ability to bring back the dead.”

What?

“It was curse – the dead rose, but they were still dead.  And rotting.  But about a year ago there was a woman who – she thought she was the next messiah because she could heal people.  She really could, but… it didn’t end well.  It turned out that she couldn’t heal herself.  But she gave it to Duke before she died.  He can’t heal other people, but he can heal himself.  I’ve seen him do it.”

The scars across his chest.

She tried to process what he was saying.  Her mind was soupy mud, thick and unmoving, unstructured by shock.  Duke could …

She pulled off his vest – probably the only reason the orc’s blade hadn’t split him right in two – ripped apart the already ruined shirt beneath it.

The wound stitched itself together even as she watched, from the bottom up, already a pink line near the breastbone, still gaping but unbleeding at the top, a puckered line in between. And not just on the surface, the flesh underneath binding itself together – a natural healing process at unnatural speed –

A pulse!  He had pulse.  A goddamn real fucking pulse.

She slid her knees out from under, laid Duke flat on the floor. Breathed for him, once, twice – Duke responded with a choked cough, breathing on his own.  Opened his eyes, and then grabbed her with his good arm, rolling her over him so that the artificial respiration became a full length make-out there on the floor.

Dana broke it off when she couldn’t breathe herself, caught up between the crying and the kissing and the laughing in relief.

“When you two are quite finished…” Nathan drawled.  Dana would have been offended except for the way he was undone himself, propped up against the wall himself, legs out straight and staring at Duke.  Of the three of them, Duke was on his feet first, pulling Nathan up into a manly one-armed hug.  Macho bastards, the pair of them.  Like they were fooling anybody.

Duke pulled her up, too, tilted her chin up when she couldn’t meet his gaze.  “I love you, too,” he said, simply.

She pushed him away with an almost punch to his chest – the opposite side of where a scar was fading even now.  “You _bastard_.  You’re going to make it up to me, scaring me like that.”  He could have said _something_ before now, warned her somehow.

Duke grinned, and her imagination started running like a roller coaster at the wicked gleam in his eyes.  “My pleasure.”

“Okay.  Leaving now.”  Nathan muttered.

 

They found one of the six sitting on the floor in one of the hallways, legs stretched on the floor.  His massive sword lay on the floor on the opposite side of the hall.  Dana put the Taser away – realizing that it likely wouldn’t penetrate the armor he wore.

He looked up at them.  “I don’t like this level.”

She knelt, Duke right behind her with a hand on her shoulder,  “Where are you from?”

“Miami. Shawn said – he said that he had made a new level.  Super realistic.  I can’t – I can’t figure out how to turn it off.”

She told him to take off his helmet, and the rest of his costume.  Walk out of the school.  Pretend to be a student.  Call his parents as soon as he got the chance.

He looked at her, still trying to process.  “It isn’t real.  It can’t be real.”

She took his hand, pulled him to his feet.  “It isn’t.  It’s just a game.  You’ll forget all about it.”

He started walking away, dropping pieces of his costume as he went.  “I hate this fucking game.”

 

Shawn Wright had locked himself in the gymnasium with the principal, two teachers and about twenty students – lording it over the frightened group with bolts of lightning-like power, and throwing things around the room with gestures of his arm.  Of course, to Nathan the gym looked like an great black cave right now, complete with fiery torches and deeper pit with a lava like glow from beneath.

Dana confirmed that he was actually throwing things with his mind – sports equipment and chunks out of the wall – not boulders or explosive weapons.

Telekinesis. That was just great.

And he’d locked the doors to the gym – enormous iron gates – somehow. Nothing physical that Nathan could see.  A spell of some sort.

Nathan knew almost nothing about these kinds of games.  Duke denied it as well, with an ear to ear grin.  “I have a life, Nathan. And a girl,” with a significant tug on Dana’s waist, pulling her up even tighter to his side.  Dana just shook her head.  Presumably, in reference to the game question, though it could have been more layered than that.

They’d been glued together ever since – jesus, ever since they’d met.  But literally skin to skin since Duke had… resurrected… in the school hallway.

Duke was hard to look at right now.  Not just whole coming back to life bit – though that curdled in Nathan’s gut somehow that Troubles rarely did anymore.  It was how he seemed to be wiped clean, polished and glowing.  Happy and at peace, like – Nathan realized – he’d _never_ been.  Not as a kid, not as a troubled young man – taking his newly won boat like a turtle with him and setting out for anywhere that wasn’t his home town, and certainly not as a Troubled resident of Haven. Duke… right now Duke looked remade.  Not just restored – broken down and polished and chromed and put back together with loving hands so that the pieces of him fit like never before.  Better than before.

Vince was wrong.  Vince had to be wrong.

This was not a curse.  Please, Nathan prayed. To whoever might be listening. _Please_. 

He was not jealous as Duke and Dana pancaked together against the wall, unwilling to let even air get between them.  They had identical expressions, weapons ready, waiting for him to tell them what to do about Shawn Wright.  He was not jealous; but he ached, a little, for their togetherness and his separateness.

“What now?” Duke asked, as if they were almost ready for  the dessert course.

“We have to find a way to talk to him.”

“Talk?!  You want to talk to him?” Dana jeered, incredulous.

“What do you want to do?”

“I want him _flayed_.”

Not Audrey.  “After he releases the hostages,” Nathan agreed.  He had them beat on weapons.  He literally controlled the game.  At some point he was going to do what he’d come to the school to do.

“Fine,” Dana said, and wrenched open the iron gates of the gymnasium doors, “let’s go _talk_ to him.”

 

“Identify yourself, Huntress,” Shawn said, pointing his axe at her.

Nathan came in behind her on the right, Duke on her left – “Hell – lo,” Duke leered.

“What do you see?” Dana circled around – puppy after its tail – trying to find what he was looking at.

“You’re purple.  And,” he motioned a curving female figure, “wow.  Can I just say… that’s what I want for Christmas.  And my birthday.”

She turned to face Shawn, wondering if blush showed up under purple skin.  She knew enough about these games to guess what her character’s costume was probably like.  Designed for allure rather than any practical fighting use.  That and the frank stare Duke gave her.  Warming, but distracting. 

Duke laughed freely at Nathan, “Love the tail.  Suits you.”

“I can throw something for you to fetch, dog boy.”

“Really?”  Duke examined his own limbs, put his hands over his face.

“Boys.”  It was not quite a snap, but – focus, come on.  They looked the same as ever to her.

Shawn himself wore a death mask/helmet thing, with curving horns on top.  Practical armor, chain mail and a great curving axe.  He’d come out of the game like this, she guessed. He looked the same as on the other side of the door, that axe was real.  The rest of it was some sort of projected illusion.

“Identify yourself!”  Shawn’s axe came up.

“No.”

“Then you mark yourself as an enemy, Huntress.  I am a Death Knight.  I will –”

“Yeeeah,” Dana drawled boredom.  “I’m not playing a game here,  Shawn. I’m certainly not playing your game.” 

Talk to him.

All her voices were telling her the same, and they never agreed 100% on anything.  Just as well she hadn’t brought the M16.  Shawn would have an extra hole in his head by now and she and Duke would be on their way home to celebrate.

How could she _talk_ to this psychopath?

Shawn grabbed one of the hostages, a woman her age – who seemed to try to crawl inside herself out of fear.  Held a knife to her throat. “TELL ME who you are!”

“My name is Dana.  These are my friends, Duke and Nathan.”

“Name your allegiance.”

Dana smiled, unexpected tears stinging her eyes.  “You know what, for the longest time, I couldn’t have answered that.  It was just me, and I – I ran and I ran…  I used to know a lot of boys like you.  Just a couple years older, most of them.  They all – they all played at these war games just like you.  Only for them, their enemies were real.  And the bullets and the bombs were real and there was no magic.  When they died, when I couldn’t save them no matter how hard I tried….”  Heroes.  How she hated that word.  A boy went from soldier, fighter, team member to hero only when he died.  When she couldn't save him.

She was peripherally aware of Duke and Nathan moving slowly to opposite sides.  She blocked it out and concentrated.  “Do you know what I saw today?  I saw a man come back to life.  He was dead.  Now he’s not.  I can’t explain that." She wanted to hug that close to her chest, that such a thing was allowed.  Was possible, even if it was only in Haven. That it was Duke who was saved, that was a miracle, a gift and a debt, but just that there was a possibility of such a thing...  Wonder was allowed.  Hope was possible.

She took a step closer, kept his attention on her.  "Your friend Randall is dead.  Do you even care?”

“How did he come back?”

She was emptying her heart out to a fucking sociopath.  “I don’t know. This is Haven.”  She didn’t look at him, but she directed her words at Duke, not the empty shell of a human being in front of her.  “There was a time when I would have sold my soul to – do that.  To bring people back.  To bring all of them back, all those boys.”  All her failures.  To redeem that, what price?  She couldn’t have answered but that she would pay.  Name it.  She still would.

Shawn let the hostage go, threw her down.

“Now – I’ve seen it – it can be done.  I believe.”  Duke’s eyes met hers across Shawn’s shoulder, he’d moved around that far.  She closed them to prevent the teenager from picking up on it.  “You ask me my allegiance?”  Her monkey king – the semi-divine tormentor of the gods themselves – laughing at his rebirth and his love for her a physical force across the space that divided them.  Even the interesting, unhappy police chief no longer looked at her like her face lacerated him.

Opened her eyes.  “I’m with them.”

Like it was prearranged, Duke and Nathan both charged Shawn, who whirled, hand raised.  Dana went for the axe.  She was closer – he turned back to her and blew her across the floor with a blast of power.

 

They landed on him together, Duke went high, Nathan went low – Shawn went down hard.  Crash test dummy hard.  Nathan heard something crack when his head hit the floor – really hoped it was Shawn and not him.  He stripped off armor and gloves – knee in his back – until he could find the kid’s wrists properly.  Cuffed him.

The hostages streamed around him, disregarding him as they ran for the doors, crying and traumatized. He couldn’t see much through them – Duke went to Dana first, pushing aside everyone else and sliding on his knees to her.  He did see her stir and try to get up – awake, thankfully.

This kid got leg shackles too, Nathan decided, and paid no attention as he screamed that the cuffs hurt him.

Dana screamed – a short surprised burst, and rolled away from Duke, clenching her fists over her eyes.  Considering that Duke was still in the wolf-like character he’d transformed into after stepping over the threshold, maybe that wasn’t so surprising.  Was Dana seeing him like that for the first time?  Nathan checked his own limbs – yep, still blue, and – damn – still cloven hooves instead of feet.  Despite being disarmed and cuffed, Shawn’s Trouble was still in full force.

Nathan met Duke halfway – he was headed for Dana, Duke apparently for the prisoner…?  But if she turned away from Duke, what chance did he have?

“Dana?” He hesitated only minutely before putting his hand on her bare shoulder.  There was little enough of her costume as it was – only to realize it wasn’t bare.  Shirt sleeve appeared beneath his hand, and the illusion of Azeroth, the cave, and their characters faded away.

Shawn had quit complaining.  Duke stood over him with eyes white with power, and blood on a little four inch dagger in his hand.

“Nathan?” She turned over towards him.  Dark, slate-blue eyes looked up at him.  “ _What_ is going on?”

_________________________

...tbc...

**Author's Note:**

> Sex and violence to come...  
> This is the first 'episode' of my AU season three - because I couldn't wait for the show to return.


End file.
